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THE / 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 
YEAR BOOK 




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BOSTON AND NEW YORK O /-of//^"'^^ 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 



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Copyright," 1889, 1S94, 
By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

All rights resetfed. 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A. 
Electxotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. 



PUBLISHERS" NOTE. 

The present selection of passages from Dr. 
Holmes's writings follows that adopted in the 
Hchnes Birthday Book published several years 
ago. The selection then made had such re- 
gard for significant days, and offered so wide 
a range of illustration of Dr. Holmes's genius, 
tiiat the Publishers are comident it will be 
equally acceptable jn its present form. 

Boston. October ij, rSq4. 



I don't believe anything I 've written is as 
good as it seemed to me when I wrote it, — 
the Old Master stopped, for he was afraid he 
was lying, — not much that I 've written, at 
any rate, — he said — with a smile at the hon- 
esty which made him qualify his statement. 
But I do know this : I have struck a good 
many chords, first and last, in the conscious- 
ness of other people. I confess to a tender 
feeling for my little brood of thoughts. When 
they have been welcomed and praised it has 
pleased me, if at any time they have been 
rudely handled and spitefully entreated it has 
cost me a little worry. I don't despise repu- 
tation, and I should like to be remembered 
as having said something worth lasting well 
enough to last. 

The Poet at the Breakfast- Table 



2^anuarp» 



The cheerful fire-light's glow 
Streamed through the casement o'er the spectral 

snow ; 
Here, while the night-wind wreaked its frantic will 
On the loose ocean and the rock-bound hill, 
Rent the cracked topsail from its quivering yard, 
And rived the oak a thousand storms had scarred, 
Fenced by these walls the peaceful taper shone, 
Nor felt a breath to slant its trembling cone. 

Not all unblest the mild interior scene 
When the red curtain spread its falling screen ; 
O'er some light task the lonely hours were past, 
And the long evening only flew too fast ; 
Or the wide chair its leathern arms would lend 
In genial welcome to some easy friend. . . . 

Such the warm life this dim retreat has known. 
Not quite deserted when its guests were flown ; 
Nay, filled with friends, an unobtrusive set. 
Guiltless of calls and cards and etiquette. 
Ready to answer, never known to ask, 
Claiming no service, prompt for every task. 

The Study. 



January i. 

The wonderful exhibition of the Seasons is 
about to commence ; four shows under one cover ; 
the best ventilated place of entertainment in this 
or any other system ; the stage lighted by solar, 
lunar, and astral lamps. Performance in twelve 
parts. Overture by the feathered choir ; after 
which the white drop curtain will rise, showing 
the remarkable succession of natural scenery de- 
signed and executed solely for this planet, — real 
forests, meadows, water, earth, skies, etc. At the 
conclusion of each series of performances the 
storm-chorus will be given with the whole strength 
of the wind-instrument orchestra, and the splendid 
snow scene will be introduced, illuminated by 
grand flashes of the Aurora Borealis. 

The Seasons. 



January 2. 

Deal gently with us, ye who read ! 

Our largest hope is unfulfilled, — 
The promise still outruns the deed, — 

The tower, but not the spire, we build. 

Our whitest pearl we never find ; 

Our ripest fruit we never reach ; 
The flowering moments of the mind 

Drop half their petals in our speech. 

To MY Readers. 



January 3. 

I ^nd the great thing in this world is, not so 
much where we stand, as in what direction we are 
moving. To reach the port of heaven, we must 
sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes 
against it, — but we must sail, and not drift, nor 
lie at anchor. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Tabls. 



January 4. 

Grandmother's mother : her age I guess, 
Thirteen summers, or something less ; 
Girlish bust, but womanly air ; 
Smooth square forehead with uprolled hair. 
Lips that lover has never kissed ; 
Taper fingers and slender wrist ; 
Hanging sleeves of stiff brocade ; 
So they painted the little maid. 

On her hand a parrot green 

Sits unmoving and broods serene. 

Hold up the canvas full in view, — 

Look ! there 's a rent the light shines through, 

Dark with a century's fringe of dust, — 

That was a Red-Coat's rapier-thrust! 

Such is the tale the lady old, 

Dorothy's daughter's daughter told. 

Dorothy Q. 
A Family Portrait. 



January 5. 

It seems rather odd that winter does not fairly 
begin until the sun has turned the corner, and is 
every day shining higher and higher, in fact bring- 
ing summer to us as fast as he can. But the astro- 
nomical date corresponds with the popular belief 
as well as the meteorological record. " As the day 
lengthens, the cold strengthens." The Seasons. 

A holy life is Heaven's unquestioned text ; 
That shining guidance doubt can never mar, — 
The pillar's flame, the light of Bethlehem's star ! 
Medical Society Dinner. 



January 6. 

The welcome angel came 
Ere yet his eye with age was dim, 

Or bent his stately frame ; 

His weapon still was bright. 

His shield was lifted high 
To slay the wrong, to save the right, — 

What happier hour to die ? 

Thou orderest all things well ; 

Thy servant's work was done ; 

He lived to hear Oppression's knell. 

The shouts for Freedom won. 

In Memory of Charles Sumner. 



January 7. 

There is one disadvantage which the man of 
philosophical habits of mind suffers, as compared 
with the man of action. While he is taking an 
enlarged and rational view of the matter before 
him, he lets his chance slip through his fingers. 
The Poet at the Breakfast- Tablb. 

Run if you like, but try to keep your breath ; 
Work like a man, but don't be worked to death ; 
And with new notions, — let me change the rule, — 
Don't strike the iron till it 's slightly cool, 

A Rhymed Lesson. 



January 8. 

Hospitality is a good deal a matter of latitude, 
I suspect. The shade of a palm-tree serves an 
African for a hut ; his dwelling is all door and no 
walls ; everybody can come in. To make a morn- 
ing call on an Esquimaux acquaintance, one must 
creep through a long tunnel ; his house is all walls 
and no door except such a one as an apple with a 
worm-hole has. One might, very probably, trace 
a regular gradation between these two extremes. 
... A good deal which in colder regions is ascribed 
to mean dispositions, belongs really to mean tem- 
perature. The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



January 9. 

Don't flatter yourselves that friendship au- 
thorizes you to say disagreeable things to your in- 
timates. On the contrary, the nearer you come 
into relation with a person, the more necessary do 
tact and courtesy become. Except in cases of 
necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn 
unpleasant truths from his enemies ; they are 
ready enough to tell them. Good breeding 7tever 
forgets that amour propre is universal. 

Thb Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



January 10. 

The whole essence of true gentle-breeding lies 
in the wish and the art to be agreeable. Good- 
breeding is su7'face Christianity. Every look, move- 
ment, tone, expression, subject of discourse, that 
may give pain to another is habitually excluded 
from conversational intercourse. 

As a general rule, that society where flattery is 
acted is much more agreeable than that where it is 
spoken. Attention and deference don't require 
you to make fine speeches expressing your sense 
of unworthiness (lies) and returning all the com- 
pliments paid you. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 

Solid and square behold majestic Shaw, 
A mass of wisdom and a mine of law. 

Poem for the Harvard Anniversary. 



January ii. 

The great minds are those with a wide span, 
which couple truths related to, but far removed 
from, each other. Logicians carry the surveyor's 
chain over the track of which these are the true 
explorers. The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 

The wider the intellect, the larger and simpler 
the expressions in which its knowledge is embod- 
ied. The inferior race, the degraded and en- 
slaved people, the small-minded individual, live in 
the details which to larger minds and more ad- 
vanced tribes of men reduce themselves to axioms 
and laws. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 



January 12. 

We have a right to be proud of our Pilgrim and 
Puritan fathers. . . . They were ready to do and 
to suffer anything for their faith, and a faith 
which breeds heroes is better than an unbelief 
which leaves nothing worth being a hero for. 

The Pulpit and the Pew. 

It 's faith in something and enthusiasm for some- 
thing that makes a life worth looking at. 

The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 



January 13. 

Every word we speak is the medal of a dead 
thought or feeling, struck in the die of some hu- 
man experience, worn smooth by innumerable con- 
tacts, and always transferred warm from one 
to another. By words we share the common con- 
sciousness of the race, which has shaped itself in 
these symbols. Elsie Venner. 



January 14. 

Do you mean to say the pun-question is not 
clearly settled in your minds ? Let me lay down 
the law upon the subject. Life and language are 
alike sacred. Homicide and i^erbicide — WvaX is, 
violent treatment of a word with fatal results to 
its legitimate meaning, which is its life — are alike 
forbidden. 

A pun \sprimd facie an insult to the person you 
are talking with. It implies utter indifference to 
or sublime contempt for his remarks, no matter 
how serious. 

People that make puns are like wanton boys 
that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They 
amuse themselves and other children, but their lit- 
tle trick may upset a freight train of conversation 
for the sake of a battered witticism. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



January 15. 

I like children, — I like them, and I respect 
them. Pretty much all the honest truth-telling 
there is in the world is done by them. Do you 
know they play the part in the household which 
the king's jester, who very often had a mighty long 
head under his cap and bells, used to play for a 
monarch ? The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 

One of the greatest pleasures of childhood is 
found in the mysteries which it hides from the 
scepticism of the elders, and works up into small 
mythologies of its own. 

The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 



January 16. 

Poets, like painters, their machinery claim, 
And verse bestows the varnish and the frame ; 
Our grating English, whose Teutonic jar 
Shakes the racked axle of Art's rattling car, 
Fits like mosaic in the lines that gird 
Fast in its place each many-angled word. . . . 

The sweet Spenserian, gathering as it flows, 
Sweeps gently onward to its dying close, 
Where waves on waves in long succession pour, 
Till the ninth billow melts along the shore. 

Poetry. 



January 17. 

Shalt thou be honest ? Ask the worldly schools, 
And all will tell thee knaves are busier fools ; 
Prudent ? Industrious ? Let not modern pens 
Instruct " Poor Richard's " fellow-citizens. 

A Rhymed Lesson. 

Some larger soul hath lived and wrought, 
Whose sight was open to embrace 

The boundless realms of deed and thought. 

Birthday of Daniel Webster. 



January 18. 

Look on that form, — with eye dilating scan 
The stately mould of nature's kingliest man I 
Tower-like he stands in life's unfaded prime ; 
Ask you his name ? None asks a second time I 
He from the land his outward semblance takes, 
Where storm-swept mountains watch o'er slum- 
bering lakes. 
See in the impress which the body wears 
How its imperial might the soul declares. 

Poem for the Harvard Anniversary. 

No gloom that stately shape can hide, 
No change uncrown its brow ; behold 1 

Dark, calm, large-fronted, lightning-eyed, 
Earth has no double from its mould ! 

Birthday of Daniel Webster. 



January 19. 

The gods of the old heathen are the servants of 
to-day. Neptune, Vulcan, ^olus, and the bearer 
of the thunderbolt himself have stepped down 
from their pedestals and put on our livery. We 
cannot always master them, neither can we always 
master our servant, the horse, but we have put a 
bridle on the wildest natural agencies. The mob 
of elemental forces is as noisy and turbulent as 
ever, but the standing army of civilization keeps it 
well under, except for an occasional outbreak. 

The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 



January 20. 
The writer of many pleasant books, filled with 
lively descriptions of society, which he studied on 
the outside with a quick eye for form and color, 
and with a certain amount of sentiment, not very 
deep, but real, though somewhat frothed over by 
his worldly experiences. 

There used to be in the gallery of the Luxem- 
bourg a picture of Hippolytus and Phsedra, in 
which the beautiful young man always reminded 
me of Willis, in spite of the shortcomings of the 
living face as compared with the ideal. The 
painted youth is still blooming on the canvas, but 
the fresh-cheeked, jaunty young author of the year 
1830 has long faded out of human sight. 

The New Portfolio. 



January 21. 

The more wheels there are in a watch or a brain, 
the more trouble they are to take care of. The 
movements of exaltation which belong to genius 
are egotistic by their very nature. A calm, clear 
mind, not subject to the spasms and crises which are 
so often met with in creative or intensely percep- 
tive natures, is the best basis for love or friend- 
ship. — Observe, I am talking about fntJids. I 
won't say, the more intellect, the less capacity for 
loving ; for that would do wrong to the under- 
standing and reason. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 



January 22. 

Genius comes in clusters, and shines rarely as a 
single star. You may see this law showing itself 
in the brief periods of glory which make the names 
of Pericles and Augustus illustrious with reflected 
splendors ; in the painters, the sculptors, the 
scholars of " Leo's golden days " ; in the authors 
of the Elizabethan time ; in the poets of the first 
part of this century following that dreary period, 
suffering alike from the silence of Cowper and the 
song of Hayley. The Inevitable Trial. 



January 23. 

Between the last dandelion and violet — they 
have been found in December — and the first 
spring blossom which lifts the snow in its calyx, 
there is a frozen inter7-egnum in the vegetable 
world, save for the life-in-death of the solemn 
evergreens, the pines and firs and spruces. 

The Seasons. 

Why can't somebody give us a list of things 
that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another 
list of things that everybody says and nobody 
thinks .? 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 



January 24. 

This is a manly world we live in. Our reverence 
is good for nothing if it does not begin with self- 
respect. Occidental manhood springs from that 
as its basis ; Oriental manhood finds the great- 
est satisfaction in self-abasement. There is no 
use in trying to graft the tropical palm upon the 
Northern pine. The same divine forces underlie 
the growth of both, but leaf and flower and fruit 
must follow the law of race, of soil, of climate. 
The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 



January 25. 

While Shenstone strained in feeble flights 

With Corydon and Phillis, — 
"While Wolfe was climbing Abraham's heights 

To snatch the Bourbon lilies, — 

"Who heard the wailing infant's cry, 

The babe beneath the sheeling, 
"Whose song to-night m every sky 

Will shake earth's starry ceiling. 

We love him, praise him, just for this : 

In every form and feature, 
Through wealth and want, through woe and bliss, 

He saw his fellow-creature ! 

The Burns Centennial Celebration. 



January 26. 

A lyric conception hits me like a bullet in the 
forehead. I have often had the blood drop from 
my cheeks when it struck, and felt that I turned as 
white as death. Then comes a creeping as of 
centipedes running down the spine, — then a gasp 
and a great jump of the heart, — then a sudden 
flush and a beating in the vessels of the head, — 
then a long sigh, — and the poem is written . . . 
I said written, but I did not say copied. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Tablb. 



January 27. 

By music we reach those special states of con- 
sciousness whichj being without/ofv/i, cannot be 
shaped with the mosaics of the vocabulary. 

Elsie Venner. 

Is it an idle dream that nature shares 

Our joys, our griefs, our pastimes, and our cares ? 

Is there no summons when, at morning's call, 

The sable vestments of the darkness fall ? 

Does not meek evening's low-voiced Ave blend 

With the soft vesper as its notes ascend ? 

Does not the sunshine call us to rejoice ? 

Is there no meaning in the storm-cloud's voice ? 

No silent message when from midnight skies 

Heaven looks upon us with its myriad eyes ? 

The School-Boy. 



January 28. 

I thank God that a great many people believe 

a great deal more than I do. I think, when it 

comes to serious matters, I like those who believe 

more than I do better than those who believe less. 

The Poet at the BkeakfastTable. 

Every now and then a man's mind is stretched 
by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back 
to its former dimensions. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table.. 



January 29, 

Each closing circle of our sunlit sphere 
Seems to bring heaven more near : 
Can we not dream that those we love 
Are listening in the world above 
And smiling as they hear 
The voices known so well of friends that still are 
dear? H. C. M., H. S , J. K. W. 

Are angel faces, silent and serene, 
Bent on the conflicts of this little scene, 
Whose dream-like efforts, whose unreal strife, 
Are but the preludes to a larger life ? 

A Rhymed Lesson. 



January 30. 

Lively emotions very commonly do not strike 
us full in front, but obliquely from the side ; a 
scene or incident in undress often affects us more 
than one in full costume. The rush that should 
have flooded my soul in the Coliseum did not 
come. But walking one day in the fields about 
the city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken 
masonry, and lo ! the World's Mistress in her 
stone girdle — altcB mcenia Romce — rose before me 
and whitened my cheek with her pale shadow as 
never before or since. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Tablb. 



January 31. 

Most persons have died before they expire, — 
died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath 
is only, as it were, the locking of the door of the 
already deserted mansion. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 

They say that in his prime, 
Ere the pruning-knife of Time 

Cut him down. 
Not a better man was found 
By the Crier on his round 

Through the town. 

But now he walks the streets, 
And he looks at all he meets 

Sad and wan. 
And he shakes his feeble head, 
That it seems as if he said, 

" They are gone." 

The mossy marbles rest 

On the lips that he has prest 

In their bloom. 
And the names he loved to hear 
Have been carved for many a year 

On the tomb. The Last Leaf. 



fetituarp* 



Through my north window, in the wintry 
weather, — 
My airy oriel on the river shore, — 
I watch the sea-fowl as they flock together 

Where late the boatman flashed his dripping 
oar. 

I see the solemn gulls in council sitting 

On some broad ice-floe, pondering long and late, 

While overhead the home-bound ducks are flitting 
And leave the tardy conclave in debate. 

Those weighty questions in their breasts revolving 
Whose deeper meaning science never learns, 

Till at some reverend elder's look dissolving, 
The speechless senate silently adjourns. 

But when along the waves the shrill northeaster 
Shrieks through the laboring coaster's shrouds 
" Beware ! " 

The pale bird, kindling like a Christmas feaster 
When some wild chorus shakes the vinous air, 

Flaps from the leaden wave in fierce rejoicing, 
Feels heaven's dumb lightning thrill his torpid 
nerves. 
Now on the blast his whistling plumage poising, 
Now wheeling, whirling in fantastic curves. 

My Aviary. 



February i. 

Those who are really awake to the sights and 
sounds which the procession of the months offers 
them find endless entertainment and instruction. 
Yet there are great multitudes who are present at 
as many as threescore and ten performances, with- 
out ever really looking at the scenery, or listening 
to the music, or observing the chief actors. Some 
are too busy with their books or their handicraft, 
and many women, even, who ought to enjoy the 
sights, keep their eyes on their work or their knit- 
ting, so that they seem to see next to nothing of 

what is going on. The Seasons. 

♦ 

February 2. 

To be recognized as standing at the head of the 
medical profession in a large city implies a previ- 
ous long and arduous struggle in one who comes 
unheralded and unknown. Every step of such a 
man's ascent must be made like an Alpine climb- 
er's in the icy steep of indifference ; fortunate for 
him if he does not slip or is not crushed before he 
reaches the summit, where there is hardly room 
for more than one at a time. 

The art, which is long, does not perish with the 
fleeting life of its wisest practitioner; but to many 
the best eulogy of the best physician who comes 
after him will be that he recalls to their memory 
the skill, the wisdom, the character of Dr. Edward 
Clarke. Introduction to "Visions." 



February 3. 

My friends, I go (always other things being equal) 
for the man who inherits family traditions and the 
cumulative humanities of at least four or five gen- 
erations. . . . One may, it is true, have all the an- 
tecedents I have spoken of, and yet be a boor or a 
shabby fellow. One may have none of them and 
yet be fit for councils and courts. Then let them 
change places. Our social arrangement has this 
great beauty, that its strata shift up and down as 
they change specific gravity, without being clogged 
by layers of prescription. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



February 4. 

Since the galloping Normans came, 
England's annals have known her name ; 
And still to the three-hilled rebel town 
Dear is that ancient name's renown, 
For many a civic wreath they won. 
The youthful sire and the gray-haired son. 

Dorothy Q. 

Quincy, whose spirit breathes the selfsame fire 
That filled the bosom of his youthful sire, 
"Who for the altar bore the kindled torch 
To freedom's temple, dying in its porch. 

Poem for the Harvard Anniversary. 



February 5. 

A woman who does not carry a halo of good feel- 
ing and desire to make everybody contented about 
with her wherever she goes, — an atmosphere of 
grace, mercy, and peace, of at least six feet radius, 
which wraps every human being upon whom she 
voluntarily bestows her presence, and so flatters 
him with the comfortable thought that she is 
rather glad he is alive than otherwise, is n't worth 
the trouble of talking to, as a woman ; she may do 
well enough to hold discussions with. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table, 
♦— 

February 6. 

Brownell weathered the great battle-storms on 
the same deck with Farragut, and has told their 
story as nobly as his leader made the story for 
him to tell. . . . The words themselves have the 
weight and the rush of shot and shell, and the 
verses seem aflame with the passion of the con- 
flict, — then as the strife calms itself after the 
victory is won, the wild dithyrambic stanzas rock 
themselves into sweet even cadences. . . . They 
are to all the drawing-room battle-poems as the 
torn flags of our victorious armadas to the stately 
ensigns that dressed their ships in harbor. New 
modes of warfare thundered their demand for a 
new poet to describe them ; and Nature has an- 
swered in the voice of our Battle-Laureate. 

Our Battle- Laureate. 



February 7. 

Why was our great prose-minstrel mourned by 
nations, and buried with kings ? Not merely be- 
cause of that genius, prolific as Nature herself, we 
might almost say, in types of character, and aspects 
of life, whom for this sufficient reason, we dare to 
name in connection with the great romancer of the 
North, but because he vindicated humanity, not 
against its Maker, but against itself ; because he 
took the part of his frail, erring, sorrowing, dying 
fellow-creature, with a voice that touched the heart 
as no other had done since the Scotch peasant 
was laid down to slumber in the soil his song had 
hallowed. 

Mechanism in Thought and Morals. 



February 8. 

Never was there such a pawn-shop for poets to 
borrow from as the Anatomy of Melancholy. By- 
ron knew this well, and tells the world as much. 
... I do not believe there is any living author who 
will not find that he is represented in his prede- 
cessors, if he will hunt for himself in Burton. . . . 
Even the puns and quibbles we have thought 
our own we are startled to find in these pages 
which take, not the bread out of our mouths, per- 
haps, but at least the Attic salt which was the sea- 
soning of our discourse. 

Pillow-Smoothing Authors. 



February 9. 

One who means to talk with entire sincerity al- 
ways feels himself in danger of two things, name- 
ly, — an affectation of bluntness,like that of which 
Cornwall accuses Kent in " Lear," and actual rude- 
ness. 

What a man wants to do, in talking with a 
stranger, is to get and to give as much of the best 
and most real life that belong to the two talkers as 
the time will let him. Life is short, and conver- 
sation apt to run to mere words. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 



February 10. 

Poor, dear Charles Lamb, — we can hardly with- 
hold the pitying epithet, since the rough Scotch- 
man brought up against him, as one of his own 
kale-pots might have shivered a quaint and pre- 
cious amphora, — poor, dear Charles, — he did not 
invent any grand formula, he certainly had not the 
lever of Archimedes, but he had a personality 
which was quite apart from that of all average hu- 
manity, and he is adopted as one of the pleasant- 
est inmates of memory. 

It is enough to say of many men that they are 
interesting. And we are content to say of many 
others that they are useful, virtuous, praiseworthy, 
illustrious, even, by what they have achieved, but 
««interesting. An After-Bkeakfast Talk. 



February it. 

What though for months the tranquil dust de- 
scends, 
"Whitening the heads of these mine ancient friends, 
While the damp offspring of the modern press 
Flaunts on my table xAth. its pictured dress ; 
Not less I love each dull familiar face, 
Nor less should miss it from the appointed place ; 
I snatch the book, along whose burning leaves 
His scarlet web our wild romancer weaves, 
Yet, while proud Hester's fiery pangs I share, 
My old Magnalia must be standing //leref 

The Study. 



February 12. 

Our hearts lie buried in the dust 
With him so true and tender, 

The patriot's stay, the people's trust, 
The shield of the offender. 



Dear Lord, with pitying eye behold 

This martyr generation, 
Which thou through trials manifold. 

Art showing thy salvation ! 
O let the blood by murder spilt 
Wash out thy stricken children's guilt 

And sanctify our nation ! 

In Memory of Abraham Lincoln. 



February 13. 

Reason may be the lever, but sentiment gives 
you the fulcrum and the place to stand on if you 
want to move the world. Even "sentimentality," 
which is sentiment overdone, is better than that 
affectation of superiority to human weakness 
which is only tolerable as one of the stage proper- 
ties of full-blown dandyism, and is, at best, but half- 
blown cynicism. 

The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 

In spite of all that Time is bringing, — 
Treasures of truth and miracles of art. 

Beauty and Love will keep the poet singing. 
And song still live, — the science of the heart. 
The Coming Eka. 



February 14. 

On the 14th of February the windows fill with 
pictures for the most part odious, and meant for 
some nondescript class of males and females, their 
allusions having reference to Saint Valentine's 
day, the legendary pairing time of the birds. The 
festival is a sad mockery, for there are no spring 
birds here to pair, but it reminds us that there is 
a good time coming. The Seasons. 



February 15. 

Ye go to bear the saving word 

To tribes unnamed and shores untrod : 
Heed well the lessons ye have heard 

From those old teachers taught of God. 

Yet think not unto them was lent 
All light for all the coming days, 

And Heaven's eternal wisdom spent 
In making straight the ancient ways. 

Robinson of Leyden. 



February 16. 
Our reverence becomes more worthy, or, if you 
will, less unwortiiy of its Infinite Object in propor- 
tion as our intelligence is lifted and expanded to 
a higher and broader understanding of the Divine 
methods of action. Border Lines of Knowledge. 

Lord of all life, below, above, 

Whose light is truth, whose warmth is love, 

Before thy ever-blazing throne 

We ask no lustre of our own. 

Grant us thy truth to make us free, 
And kindling hearts that burn for thee, 
Till all thy living altars claim 
One holy light, one heavenly flame ! 

A Sun-Day Hymn. 



February 17. 

To study nature without fear is possible, but 
without reproach, impossible. The man who wor- 
ships in the temple of knowledge must carry his 
arms with him as our Puritan fathers had to do 
when they gathered in their first rude meeting- 
houses. The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 

Every real thought on every real subject knocks 
the wind out of somebody or other. As soon as 
his breath comes back, he very probably begins to 
expend it in hard words. These are the best evi- 
dence a man can have that he has said something 
it was time to say. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



February 18. 

He at whose word the orb that bore him shivered 
To find her central sovereignty disowned, 

While the wan lips of priest and pontiff quivered, 
Their jargon stilled, their Baal disenthroned. 
A Welcome to Dr. B. A. Gould. 

Bankrupt ! our pockets inside out ! 

Empty of words to speak his praises ! . . . 
Vet why with flowery speeches tease. 

With vain superlatives distress him ? 
Has language better words than these? 

The friend of all his race, God bless 

HIM ! To George Peabody. 



February 19. 

So full on life her magic mirror shone, 
Her sister Arts paid tribute to her throne; 
One reared her temple, one her canvas warmed, 
And music thrilled, while Eloquence informed. 
The weary rustic left his stinted task 
For smiles and tears, the dagger and the mask; 
The sage, turned scholar, half forgot his lore, 
To be the woman he despised before ; 
O'er sense and thought she threw her golden chain, 
And Time, the anarch, spares her deathless reign. 

Poetry. 

February 20. 

Among living people none remain so long un- 
changed as the actors. The graveyard and the 
stage are pretty much the only places where you 
can expect to find your friends as you left them, 
five and twenty or fifty years ago. — I have noticed, 
I may add, that old theatre-goers bring back the 
past with their stories more vividly than men with 

any other experiences. 

The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 

Children of later growth, we love the Play, 
We love its heroes, be they grave or gay. 
Adore its heroines, these immortal dames. 
Time's only rivals, whom he never tames. 

Opening of the Fifth Avenue Theatre. 



February 21. 

All men are afraid of books, who have not han- 
dled them from infancy. Do you suppose our dear 
didascolos over there ever read Poli Synopsis, or 
consulted Castdli Lexicon, while he was growing 
up to their stature ? Not he ; but virtue passed 
through the hem of their parchment and leather 
garments whenever he touched them, as the pre- 
cious drugs sweated through the bat's handle in the 
Arabian story. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



February 22. 

Welcome to the day returning, 

Dearer still as ages flow, 
While the torch of Faith is burning, 

Long as Freedom's altars glow! 
See the hero whom it gave us 

Slumbering on a mother's breast ; 
For the arm he stretched to save us, 

Be its morn forever blest ! 

Ode for Washington's Birthday. 

New England's home-bred scholar, well you knew 
Her soil, her speech, her people, through and 

through, 
And loved them ever with the love that holds 
All sweet, fond mem^ories in its fragrant folds. 

To James Russell Lowell, 



February 23. 
Youthful extravagance — the untamed enthusi- 
asm which is the source of all great thoughts and 
deeds, — a beautiful delirium which age commonly 
tames down, and for which the cold shower-bath 
the world furnishes gratis proves a pretty certain 
cure. The Guardian Angel. 

The voices of morning ! how sweet is their thrill 
When the shadows have turned, and the evening 

grows still ! 
The text of our lives may get wiser with age, 
But the print was so fair on its twentieth page ! 
Our Indian Summer. 



February 24. 

There are three young men in history whose 
names always present themselves to me in a spe- 
cial companionship : Pico della Mirandola, " The 
Phoenix of the Age " for his contemporaries ; 
" The Admirable Crichton," accepting as true the 
accounts which have come down to us of his won- 
derful accomplishments ; and Sidney, the Bayard 
of England. . . . The English paragon of excellence 
was but thirty-two years old when he was slain at 
Zutphen, the Italian Phoenix but thirty-one when 
he was carried off by a fever, and the Scotch pro- 
digy of gifts and attainments was only twenty-two 
when he was assassinated by his worthless pupil. 
Our Hundred Days in Europe. 



February 25. 
A warm day in December is a memory of Octo- 
ber ; a warm day in February is a dream of April. 
Their character is unmistakable ; we cannot help 
going back in imagination with the one, and for- 
ward with the other. The Seasons. 

A mellowing rigorist is always a much pleasanter 
object to contemplate than a tightening liberal, as 
a cold day warming up to 32° Fahrenheit is much 
more agreeable than a warm one chilling down 
to the same temperature. 

The Poet at the Break fast-Tablb. 



February 26. 

Nature gets us out of youth into manhood as 
sailors are hurried on board of vessels, — in a state 
of intoxication. We are hustled into maturity 
reeling with our passions and imagination, and we 
have drifted far away from port before we awake out 
of our illusions. But to carry us out of maturity 
into old age, without our knowing where we are 
going she drugs us with strong opiates, and so we 
stagger along with wide-open eyes that see nothing 
until snow enough has fallen on our heads to rouse 
our comatose brains out of their stupid trances. 
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



February 27. 

Modest he seems, not shy ; content to wait 
Amid the noisy clamor of debate 
The looked-for moment when a peaceful word 
Smooths the rough ripples louder tongues have 

stirred. 
In every tone I mark his tender grace 
And all his poems hinted in his face ; 
What tranquil joy his friendly presence gives ! 

At the Saturday Club. 
Ah, gentlest soul ! how gracious, how benign 
Breathes through our troubled life that voice of 

thine, 
Filled with a sweetness born of happier spheres, 
That wins and warms, that kindles, softens, cheers, 
That calms the wildest woe and stays the bitterest 
tears ! To H. W. Longfellow. 



• February 28. 

All generous companies of artists, authors, phi- 
lanthropists, men of science, are, or ought to be. 
Societies of Mutual Admiration. A man of gen- 
ius, or any kind of superiority, is not debarred 
from admiring the same quality in another, nor the 
other from returning his admiration. They may 
even associate together and continue to think 
highly of each other. And so of a dozen such 
men, if any one place is fortunate enough to hold 
so many. The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



February 29. 

O my lost beauty ! — hast thou folded quite 

Thy wings of morning light 

Beyond those iron gates 
Where Life crowds hurrying to the haggard Fates, 
And Age upon his mound of ashes waits 

To chill our fiery dreams, 
Hot from the heart of youth plunged in his icy 
streams ? 

Leave me not fading in these weeds of care, 
Whose flowers are silvered hair ! 
Have I not loved thee long, 
Though my young lips have often done thee wrong, 
And vexed thy heaven-tuned ear with careless 
song? 
Ah, wilt thou yet return. 
Bearing thy rose-hued torch, and bid thine altar 
burn ? ^usA. 



a^arcf)* 



AT MY FIRESIDE. 

Alone, beneath the darkened sky, 

With saddened heart and unstrung lyre, 
I heap the spoils of years gone by, 
And leave them with a long-drawn sigh. 
Like drift-wood brands that glimmering lie, 
Before the ashes hide the fire. 



Let not these slow declining days 
The rosy light of dawn outlast ; 
Still round my lonely hearth it plays, 
And gilds the east with borrowed rays, 
While memory's mirrored sunset blaze 
Flames on the windows of the past. 
March i, 1888. 



March i. 

And these were they who gave us birth, 
The Pilgrims of the sunset wave, 

Who won for us this virgin earth, 
And freedom with the soil they gave. 

The pastor slumbers by the Rhine, — 

In alien earth the exiles lie, — 
Their nameless graves our holiest shrine, 

His words our noblest battle-cry ! 

Still cry them, and the world shall hear. 
Ye dwellers by the storm-swept sea ! 

Ye have not built by Haerlem Meer, 
Nor on the land-locked Zuyder-Zee ! 

Robinson of Leyden. 



March 2. 

One must go to the country to find people who 
are constantly enough in the midst of the sights 
and sounds of the opening year to take cognizance 
of the order of that grand procession, with March 
blowing his trumpet at the head of it, and April 
following with her green flag, and the rest com- 
ing in their turn, till February brings up the rear 
with his white banner. The Seasons. 

The silent changes of the rolling years. 
Marked on the soil, or dialled on the spheres. 

Poetry. 



March 3. 

This noble language which we have inherited 
from our English fathers. Language ! — the blood 
of the soul, into which our thoughts run and out 
of which they grow ! 

The English language was wound up to run 
some thousands of years, I trust ; but if everybody 
is to be pulling at everything he thinks is a hair, 
our grandchildren will have to make the discovery 
that it is a \\2AX-spri7ig and the old Anglo-Norman 
soul's-timekeeper will run down, as so many other 
dialects have done before it. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Tablb. 



March 4. 

We all have to assume a standard of judgment 
in our own minds, either of things or persons. A 
man who is willing to take another's opinion has 
to exercise his judgment in the choice of whom to 
follow, which is often as nice a matter as to judge 
of things for one's self. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 

They little know the tidal movements of national 
thought and feehng, who believe that they de- 
pend for existence on a few swimmers who ride 
their waves. It is not Leviathan that leads the 
ocean from continent to continent, but the ocean 
which bears his mighty bulk as it wafts its own 
bubbles. The Inevitable Trial. 



March 5. 

Did you ever see that electrical experiment 
which consists in passing a flash through letters of 
gold leaf in a darkened room, whereupon some 
name or legend springs out of the darkness in char- 
acters of fire ? 

There are songs all written out in my soul 
which I could read, if the flash might pass through 
them, — but the fire must come down from heaven. 
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



March 6. 

A creating and informing spirit, which is with 
us and not of us, is recognized everywhere in real 
and in storied life. It is the Muse of Homer ; it 
is the Daimon of Socrates ; it is the inspiration of 
the seer ; it shaped the forms that filled the soul 
of Michael Angelo when he saw the figure of the 
great Lawgiver in the yet unhewn marble, and the 
dome of the world's yet unbuilt basilica against 
the blank horizon ; it comes to the least of us as a 
voice that will be heard ; it frames our sentences ; 
it lends a sudden gleam of sense or eloquence 
to the dullest of us all, so that we wonder at 
ourselves, or rather not at ourselves, but at this 
divine visitor, who chooses our brain as his dwell- 
ing-place, and invests our naked thought with the 
purple of the kings of speech or song. 

Mechanism in Thought and Morals. 



March 7. 

I never saw an author in my life — saving, per- 
haps, one — that did not purr as audibly as a full- 
grown domestic cat {Felis Catus, Linn.), on having 
his fur smoothed in the right way by a skilful hand. 

But let me give you a caution. Be very careful 
how you tell an author he is droll. Ten to one he 
will hate you. . . . Say you cried over his romance 
or his verses, and he will love you and send you a 
copy. You can laugh over that as much as you 
like — in private. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



March 8. 

When you pay a compliment to an author, don't 
qualify it in the next sentence so as to take all the 
goodness out of it, . . . and be careful to assure 
yourself that the person you are talking with wrote 
the article or book you praise. It is not very pleas- 
ant to be told, " Well, there now ! I always liked 
your writings, but you never did anything half so 
good as this last piece," and then to have to tell 
the blunderer that this last piece is n't yours, but 
t'other man's. 

Take care that the phrase or sentence you com- 
mend is not one that is in quotation-marks. The 
pearl upon the Ethiop's arm is very pretty in verse, 
but one does not care to furnish the dark back- 
ground for other persons' jewelry. 

The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 



March 9. 

Because a man does not say much, it does not 
follow that he may not have an exalted and in- 
tense inner life. I have known a number of cases 
where a man who seemed thoroughly common- 
place and unemotional has all at once surprised 
everybody by telling the story of his hidden life 
far more pointedly and dramatically than any play- 
wright or novelist or poet could have told it for 
him. The Poet at the Breakfast- Table. 



March 10. 

I '11 tell you who I think are the best talkers in 
all probability, — poets who never write verses. 
And there are a good many more of these than it 
would seem at first sight. I think you may say every 
young lover is a poet, to begin with. I don't 
mean either that all young lovers are good talkers ; 
but a little talk goes a good way in most of these 
cooing matches, and it would n't do to report them 
too literally. What I mean is that a man with 
the gift of musical and impassioned phrase (and 
love often lends that to a young person for a while), 
who " wreaks " it, to borrow Byron's word, on con- 
versation as the natural outlet of his sensibilities 
and spiritual activities, is likely to talk better than 
the poet, who plays on the instrument of verse. 
A great pianist or violinist is rarely a great singer. 
The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 



March ii. 

He must be a poor creature that does not often 
repeat himself. Imagine the author of the excel- 
lent piece of advice, " Know thyself," never allud- 
ing to that sentiment again during the course of a 
protracted existence ! Why, the truths a man car- 
ries about with him are his tools ; and do you 
think a carpenter is bound to use the same plane 
but once to smooth a knotty board with, or to 
hang up his hammer after it has driven its first nail ? 
The Autocrat of The Breakfast-Table. 



March 12. 

There are about as many twins in the births of 
thought as of children. For the first time in your 
lives you learn some fact or come across some idea. 
Within an hour, a day, a week, that same fact or 
idea strikes you from another quarter. It seems 
as if it had passed into space and bounded back 
upon you as an echo from the blank wall that 
shuts in the world of thought. Yet no possible 
connection exists between the two channels by 
which the thought or the fact arrived. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 

A thought is often original though you have ut- 
tered it a hundred times. It has come to you over 
a new route, by a new and express train of associa* 
tions. The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



March 13. 

In Italy, the works of mediaeval Art seem to be 
of yesterday, — Rome is but an intruding new- 
comer, as we contemplate her in the shadow of the 
Cyclopean walls of Fiesole or Volterra. It makes 
a man human to live on these old humanized soils. 
He cannot help marching in step with his kind 
in the rear of such a procession. 

They say a dead man's hand cures swellings, if 
laid on them. There is nothing like the dead cold 
hand of the Past to take down our tumid egotism 
and lead us into the solemn flow of the life of our 
race. Rousseau came out of one of his sad self- 
torturing fits, as he cast his eye on the arches of 
the old Roman aqueduct, the Pont du Gard. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Tablb. 



March 14. 

If Switzerland touched the deepest chord in my 
consciousness, a solemn bass note which Nature 
had never before set in vibration, Italy reached a 
string which returned a keener and higher note 
than any to which my inward sense had before re- 
sponded. Italy, more especially Rome, leaves af- 
ter it an infinite longing which haunts the soul for- 
ever. A Prospective "Visit. 
In the smile of those blue-vaulted skies, 

Earth's fairest dome of all divinest art. 

After a Lecture on Shelley. 



March 15. 

Our houses shape themselves palpably on our 
inner and outer natures. See a householder break- 
ing up and you will be sure of it. There is a 
shell-fish which builds all manner of smaller shells 
into the walls of its own. A house is never home 
until we have crusted it with the spoils of a hun- 
dred lives besides those of our own past. See 
what these are and you can tell what the occupant 
IS. The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



March 16. 

The worst of a modern mansion is that it has no 
place for ghosts. I watched one building not long 
since. It had no proper garret, to begin with, only 
a sealed interval between thereof and attics, where 
a spirit could -not be accommodated unless it were 
flattened out like Ravel, Brother, after the mill- 
stone had fallen on him. There was not a nook or 
a corner in the whole house fit to lodge any respec- 
table ghost, for every part was as open to observa- 
tion as aliterary man's character and condition, his 
figure and estate, his coat and his countenance, are 
to his (or her) Bohemian Majesty on a tour of in- 
spection through his (or her) subjects' keyholes. 
The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 



March 17. 

Every person's feelings have a front-door and 
a side-door by which they may be entered. The 
front door is on the street. Some keep it always 
open ; some keep it latched ; some, locked ; some, 
bolted, — with a chain that will let you peep in, 
but not get in ; and some nail it up, so that noth- 
ing can pass its threshold. This front-door leads 
into a passage which opens into an anteroom, and 
this into the interior apartments. The side-door 
opens at once into the sacred chambers. 

There is almost always at least one key to this 
side-door. This is carried for years hidden in a 
mother's bosom. Fathers, brothers, sisters, and 
friends, often, but by no means so universally, 
have duplicates of it. The wedding-ring conveys 
a right to one ; alas, if none is given with it ! 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



March 18. 

There are two veils of language, hid beneath 
Whose sheltering folds, we dare to be ourselves; 
And not that other self which nods and smiles 
And babbles in our name ; the one is Prayer, 
Lending its licensed freedom to the tongue 
That tells our sorrows and our sins to Heaven ; 
The other. Verse, that throws its spangled web 
Around our naked speech and makes it bold. 

Wind-Clouds and Star-Drifts. 



March 19. 
The brain is the palest of all the internal or- 
gans, and the heart the reddest. Whatever comes 
from the brain carries the hue of the place it came 
from, and whatever comes from the heart carries 
the heat and color of its birthplace. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Tablb. 
Snows were melting down the vale, 
And Earth unlaced her icy mail, 
And March his stormy trumpet blew ; 
And tender green came peeping through. 
After a Lecture on Keats, 



March 20. 
Tht last we see of snow is, in the language of a 
native poet, 

" The lingering drift behind the shady wall." 

This is from a bard more celebrated once than 
now, Timothy Dwight. . . . The line with the drift 
in it has stuck in my memory like a feather in an 
old nest, and is all that remains to me of his 
" Greenfield Hill." 

When there is nothing left of the winter snow 
but these ridges behind the stone walls, and a dingy 
drift here and there in a hollow, or in the woods, 
Winter has virtually resigned the icicle which is 
his sceptre. It only remains to break the seals 
which are the warrants of his hitherto undisputed 
reign. The Seasons. 



March 21. 

Its utterance rises through all the gamut of Na- 
ture's multitudmous voices, and has a note for all 
her outward sounds and inward moods. It imi- 
tates all instruments ; it cheats the listener with 
the sound of singing choirs. Within its breast all 
the passions of humanity seem to reign in turn. 
It moans with the dull ache of* grief, and cries 
with the sudden thrill of pain ; it sighs, it shouts, 
it laughs, it exults, it wails, it pleads, it trembles, 
it shudders, it threatens, it storms, it rages, it is 
soothed, it slumbers. 

Such is the organ, man's nearest approach to 
the creation of a true organism. 

The Great Instrument, 

March 22. 

An author may interest his public by his work, 
or by his personality, or by both. A great mathe- 
matician or metaphysician may be lost sight of in 
his own intellectual wealth, as a great capitalist 
becomes at last the mere appendage of his far 
more important millions. There is, on the other 
hand, a class of writers whose individuality is the 
one thing we care about. The world could get 
along without their help, but it wants their com- 
pany. We are not so very curious about the de- 
tails of the life of Gauss, but we do want to know 
a good deal about Richter. 

An After-Breakfast Talk. 



March 23. 

Every poem has a soul and a body, and it is the 
body of it, or the copy, that men read and pub- 
lishers pay for. The soul of it is born in an in- 
stant in the poet's soul. It comes to him a thought, 
tangled in the meshes of a few sweet words, — 
words that have loved each other from the cradle 
of the language, but have never been wedded until 
now. Whether it will ever fully embody itself in 
a bridal train of a dozen stanzas or not is uncer- 
tain but it exists potentially from the instant that 
the poet turns pale with it. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



March 24. 

He sings no more on earth ; our vain desire 
Aches for the voice we loved so long to hear 
In Dorian flute-notes breathing soft and clear, — 

The sweet contralto that could never tire. 

Deafened with listening to a harsher strain. 

The Maenad's scream, the stark barbarian's cry, 
Still for those soothing, loving tones we sigh ; 

Oh, for our vanished Orpheus once again ! 

The shadowy silence hears us call in vain ! 
His lips are hushed ; his song shall never die. 
Our Dead Singer. H. W. L. 

March 24^ 1882. 



March 25. 

Beware of making your moral staple consist of 
the negative virtues. It is good to abstain, and 
teach others to abstain, from all that is sinful or 
hurtful. But making a business of it leads to ema- 
ciation of character, unless one feeds largely also 
on the more nutritious diet of active sympathetic 
benevolence. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



March 26. 

Of the noted men of Andover the one whom I 
remember best was Professor Moses Stuart. ... I 
have seen few more striking figures in my life than 
his. Tall, lean, with strong, bold features, a keen, 
scholarly, accipitrine nose, thin, expressive lips, 
great solemnity and impressiveness of voice and 
manner, he was my early model of a classic orator. 
His air was Roman, and his toga, — that is, his 
broadcloth cloak — was carried on his arm, with 
such a statue-like rigid grace that he might have 
been turned into marble as he stood, and looked 
noble by the side of the antiques of the Vatican. 
Cinders from the Ashes. 

The grave scholar, lonely, calm, austere, 
Whose voice like music charmed the listening ear, 
Whose light rekindled, like the morning-star 
Still shines upon us through the gates ajar. 

Thf. School-Boy. 



March 27. 

Among my visits was one never to be renewed 
and never to be forgotten. It was to the Master 
of Trinity, the Reverend William Hepworth 
Thompson. I hardly expected to have the privi- 
lege of meeting this very distinguished and greatly 
beloved personage, famous not alone for scholar- 
ship, or as the successor of Dr. Whewell in his 
high office, but also as having said some of the 
wittiest things which we have heard since Yo\- 
X^Sx^^^ pour encotirager les autres. . . . Gentle, dig- 
nified, kindly in his address as if I had been his 
schoolmate, he left a very charming impression. 
... I had been just in time to see " the last of the 
great men " at Cambridge. 

Our Hundred Days in Europe, 
»— 

March 28. 
Two and two do not always make four, in the 
matter of hereditary descent of qualities. Some- 
times they make three, and sometimes five. It 
seems as if the parental traits at one time showed 
separate, at another blended, — that occasionally 
the force of two natures is represented in the de- 
rivative one by a diagonal of greater value than 
either original line of living movement, — that some- 
times there is a loss of vitality hardly to be ac- 
counted for, and again a forward impulse of varia- 
ble intensity in some new unforeseen direction. 
The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 



March 29. 

The property of an author does not consist, for 
the most part, of what is called real, or what is 
called personal estate, but lies chiefly in that im- 
material and intangible possession known in its 
general expression as time. . . . Kis clock will be 
found to mark and measure sixty minutes to the 
hour, and no more, like the timepieces of other own- 
ers ; which fact is contrary to the apparent belief of 
many of his visitors and correspondents. 

An After-Breakkast Talk. 
Shun such as lounge through afternoons and eves 
And on thy dial write, " Beware of thieves ! " 
Felon of minutes, never taught to feel 
The worth of treasures which thy fingers steal, 
Pick my left pocket of the silver dime. 
But spare the right, — it holds my golden time ! 
A Rhymed Lesson. 



March 30. 

The inner world of thought and the outer world 
of events are alike in this that they are both 
brimful. There is no space between consecutive 
thoughts, or between the ever-ending series of 
actions. All pack tight, and mould their surfaces 
against each other, so that in the long run there is 
a wonderful average uniformity in the forms of 
both thoughts and actions. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Tablb. 



March 31. 

His mind coupled remote ideas in a very singular 
way. Sometimes it was imagination, glancing 
from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven ; some- 
times fancy, sparkling like a firefly one moment 
here, the next there ; sometimes wit, flashing from 
the sudden collision of two thoughts that met 
like flint and steel ; less frequently humor, for hu- 
mor is fire in damp tinder, and burns too slowly 
for the swift impatience of quick kindling intelli- 
gences. . . . 

It was vigorous exercise to talk with him when 
his fancy was in its incandescent and scintillating 
mood. The fastest conversational roadster found 
him a running mate hard to keep up with. . , . 
Whether his own brain ever rested or wanted rest 
those who never remember a dull moment in his 
company might well question. . . . 

To recall this friend who has left our companion- 
ship must be to many of us one of the sweetest 
pleasures of memory. Thomas Gold Appleton. 



%pttl. 



The sunbeams, lost for half a year, 

Slant through my pane their morning rays ; 

For dry northwesters cold and clear, 
The east blows in its thin blue haze. 

And first the snowdrop's bells are seen. 

Then close against the sheltering wall 
The tulip's horn of dusky green, 

The peony's dark unfolding ball. 

The golden-chaliced crocus burns ; 

The long narcissus-blades appear ; 
The cone-beaked hyacinth returns 

To light her blue-flamed chandelier. 

The willow's whistling lashes, wrung 
By the wild winds of gusty March, 

With sallow leaflets lightly strung^ 
Are swaying by the tufted larch. 

The elms have robed their slender spray 
With full-blown flower and embryo leaf ; 

Wide o'er the clasping arch of day 
Soars like a cloud their hoary chief. 

The Spring Has Come. 



April i. 

Winter is past ; the heart of Nature warms 
Beneath the wrecks of unresisted storms ; 
Doubtful at first, suspected more than seen, 
The southern slopes are fringed with tender green. 

Spring. 
There is nothing that makes the seasons and the 
year so interesting as to watch and especially to 
keep record of the changes by which Nature marks 
the ebb and flow of the great ocean of sunshine 
which overspreads the earth. The Seasons. 



April 2. 

In order to know whether a human being is 
young or old, offer it food of different kinds at 
short intervals. If young it will eat anything at 
any hour of the day or night. If old it observes 
stated periods, and you might as well attempt to 
regulate the time of high-water to suit a fishing-party 
as to change these periods. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 

We must have a weak spot or two in a character 
before we can love it much. People that do not 
laugh or cry, or take more of anything than is 
good for them, or use anything but dictionary 
v/ords, are admirable subjects for biographies. 
But we don't always care most for those flat-pat- 
tern flowers that press best in the herbarium. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 



April 3. 

Herbert's life as pictured by Izaak Walton is, to 
borrow one of his own lines, 

" A box where sweets compacted lie ; ' 
and I felt, as I left his little chapel and his parsonage, 
as a pilgrim might feel who had just left the holy 
places at Jerusalem. 

Our Hundred Days in Europe. 
The poet and romancer give back more than 
they borrow from the scenes which lend them their 
inspiration. What was this broad stream that runs 
by your walls before it was peopled by the creative 
touch of your story-teller's imagination. It is no 
longer Hudson's river, — it is Irving's. Blessed be 
the memory of the writer who helped to teach us 
that we have a country, and showed us that we 
were to have a literature of our own. 

Irving's Power of Idealization. 
— ♦ — 

April 4. 
For him the Architect of all 

Unroofed our planet's starlit hall ; 
Through voids unknown to worlds unseen 
His clearer vision rose serene. 

Benjamin Peirck. 
True to all Truth the world denies, 
Not tongue-tied for its gilded sin ; 
Not always right in all men's eyes, 
But faithful to the light within. 

A Birthday Tribute. J. F. C. 



April 5. 

Did you ever read old Daddy Gilpin ? Slowest 
of men, even of English men ; yet delicious in his 
slowness, as is the light of a sleepy eye in woman. 
I always supposed " Dr. Syntax " was written to 
make fun of him. I have a whole set of his works, 
and am very proud of it, with its gray paper, and 
open type, and long ff, and orange-juice landscapes. 
The Pere Gilpin had the kind of science I like in 
the study of Nature, — a little less observation than 
White of Selborne, but a little more poetry. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



April 6. 

Nature is fond of what are called " gift-enter- 
prises." This little book of iife which she has 
given into the hands of its joint possessors is 
commonly one of the old story-books bound over 
again. Only once in a great while there is a state- 
ly poem in it, or its leaves are illuminated with the 
glories of art. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 

I was born and bred among books and those 
who knew what was in books. I was carefully 
instructed in things temporal and spiritual. But 
up to a considerable maturity of childhood I be- 
lieved Raphael and Michael Angelo to have been 
superhuman beings. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Tablk. 



April 7. 

Come, take the book we love so well, 

And let us read and dream 
We see whate'er its pages tell, 

And sail an English stream. 

Up to the clouds the lark has sprung, 

Still trilling as he flies ; 
The linnet sings as there he sung ; 

The unseen cuckoo cries, 

And daisies strew the banks along. 

And yellow kingcups shine, 
"With cowslips, and a primrose throng. 

And humble celandine. 

After a Lecture on Wordsworth. 



April 8. 

We, like the leaf, the summit, or the wave, 
Reflect the light our common nature gave. 
But every sunbeam, falling from her throne, 
Wears on our hearts some coloring of our own. 

Poetry. 

All that clothes a man, even to the blue sky 
which caps his head, — a little loosely, — shapes 
itself to fit each particular being beneath it. Farm- 
ers, sailors, astronomers, poets, lovers, all find it 
different, according to the eyes with which they 
severally look. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



April 9. 

On sheltered banks, beneath the dripping eaves, 
Spring's earliest nurslings spread their glowing 

leaves, 
Bright with the hues from wider pictures won, 
White, azure, golden, — drift, or sky, or sun, — 
The sw^owdrop, bearing on her patient breast 
The frozen trophy torn from Winter's crest ; 
The violet, gazing on the arch of blue 
Till her own iris wears its deepened hue ; 
The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould 
Naked and shivering with his cup of gold. 

Spring. 



April 10. 

There are minds with large ground-floors, that 
can store an infinite amount of knowledge ; some 
librarians, for instance, who know enough of books 
to help other people, without being able to make 
much other use of their knowledge, have intellects 
of this class. Your great working lawyer has two 
spacious stories; his mind is clear, because his 
mental floors are large, and he has room to ar- 
range his thoughts so that he can get at them, — 
facts below, principles above, and all in ordered 
series ; poets are often narrow below, incapable of 
clear statement, and with small power of consec- 
utive reasoning, but full of light, if sometimes 
rather bare of furniture, in the attics. 

The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 



April ii. 

Earth, air, sea, sky, the elemental fire, 

Art, history, song, — what meanings lie in each 

Found in his cunning hand a stringless lyre, 

And poured their mingling music through his 
speech. 

Thence flowed those anthems of our festal days, 
Whose ravishing division held apart 

The lips of listening throngs in sweet amaze. 
Moved in all breasts the self-same human heart. 

Subdued his accents, as of one who tries 
To press some care, some haunting sadness 
down ; 
His smile half shadow ; and to stranger eyes 
The kingly forehead wore an iron crown. 

Edward Everett. 



April 12. 

The longer I live, the more I am satisfied of two 
things : first, that the truest lives are those that 
are cut rose-diamond-fashion, with many facets 
answering to the many-planed aspects of the world 
about them ; secondly, that society is always trying 
in some way or other to grind us down to a single 
flat surface. It is hard work to resist this grind- 
ing-down action. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 



April 13. 

I find that there is a very prevalent opinion 
among the dwellers on the shores of Sir Isaac 
Newton's Ocean of Truth, that salt fish, which 
have been taken from it a good while ago, split 
open, cured and dried, are the only proper and al- 
lowable food for reasonable people. I maintain, 
on the other hand, that there are a number of live 
fish still swimming in it, and that every one of us 
has a right to see if he cannot catch some of them. 
The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 



April 14. 

who forgets when first the piercing thought 
Through childhood's musings found its way un- 
sought } 

1 AM ; — I LIVE. The mystery and the fear 
When the dread question, What has brought 

ME here .? 
Burst through life's twilight, as before the sun 
Roll the deep thunders of the morning gun ! 

A Rhymed Lesson. 

No " shoulder-striker " hits out straighter than a 
child with its logic. Why, I can remember lying 
in my bed in the nursery and settling questions 
which all that I have heard since and got out of 
books has never been able to raise again. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 



April 15. 

Did not my own consciousness migrate, or seem, 
at least, to transfer itself into this brilliant life 
history, as I traced its glowing record ? I, too, 
seemed to feel the delight of carrying with me, 
as if they were my own, the charms of a presence 
which made its own welcome everywhere. I shared 
his heroic toils, I partook of his literary and social 
triumphs, I was honored by the marks of distinc- 
tion which gathered about him, I was wronged by 
the indignity from which he suffered and mourned 
with him in his sorrow. The New Portfolio. 

April 16. 

The long roll of glowing tapestry he has woven 
for us, with all its life-like portraits, its almost 
moving pageants, its sieges where we can see the 
artillery flashing, its battle-fields with their smoke 
and fire, — pictures which cannot fade and which 
will preserve his name interwoven with their own 
enduring colors. John Lothrop Motley. 

Let us hear the proud story which time has be- 
queathed ! 

From lips that are warm with the freedom they 
breathed ! 

Let him summon its tyrants, and tell us their doom, 

Though he sweep the black past like Van Tromp 
with his broom ! A Parting Health. 

J. L. M. 



April 17. 

The laboring classes, — so called in distinction 
from the idle people who only contrive the ma- 
chinery and discover the processes and lay out the 
work and draw the charts and organize the various 
movements which keep the world going and make 
it tolerable. The organ-blower works harder with 
his muscles, for that matter, than the organ-player, 
and may perhaps be exasperated into thinking 
himself a downtrodden martyr because he does 
not receive the same pay for his services. 

The Poet at the Breakfast-Tablb» 



April 18. 

That hilt for this our souls were free, 
And but for that our lives were blest ; 

That in some season yet to be 

Our cares will leave us time to rest. 

Whene'er we groan with ache or pain, — 
Some common ailment of the race, — 

Though doctors think the matter plain, — 
That ours is " a peculiar case." 

That when like babes with fingers burned 
We count one bitter maxim more, 

Our lesson all the world has learned, 
And men are wiser than before. 

What We All Think. 



April 19. 

True to their home, these faithful arms shall toil 
To crown with peace their own untainted soil ; 
And true to God, to freedom, to mankind, . . . 
These stately forms, that bending even now 
Bowed their strong manhood to the humble 

plough, 
Shall rise erect, the guardians of the land, 
The same stern iron in the same right hand. 

The Ploughman. 

April 20. 

Thou who hast taught the teachers of mankind 

How from the least of things the mightiest grow, 
What marvel jealous Nature made thee blind, 

Lest man should learn what angels long to know ? 
Thou in the flinty rock, the river's flow. 

In the thick-moted sunbeam's sifted light 
Hast trained thy downward-pointed tube to show 

Worlds within worlds unveiled to mortal sight. 

Ah, happy they to whom the joys belong 

Of peaceful triumphs that can never die 
From History's record, — not of gilded wrong, 

But golden truths that while the world goes by 
With all its empty pageant, blazoned high 

Around the Master's name forever shine ! 
So shines thy name illumined in the sky, — 

Such joys, such triumphs, such remembrance 
thine ! To Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg. 



April 21, 

Swelled with new life, the darkening elm on high 
Prmts her thick buds against the spotted sky ; 
On all her boughs the stately chestnut cleaves 
The gummy shroud that wraps her embryo leaves ; 
The house-fly, stealing from his narrow grave, 
Drugged with the opiate that November gave, 
Beats with faint wing against the sunny pane, 
Or crawls, tenacious, o'er its lucid plain ; 
From shaded chinks of lichen-crusted walls, 
In languid curves, the gliding serpent crawls ; 
The bog's green harper, thawing from his sleep, 
Twangs a hoarse note and tries a shortened leap ; 
On floating rails that face the softening noons 
The still shy turtles range their dark platoons. 
Or, toiling aimless o'er the mellowing fields. 
Trail through the grass their tessellated shields. 

Spring. 



April 22. 

Inasmuch as religion and law and the whole so- 
cial order of civilized society, to say nothing of 
literature and art, are so founded on and pervaded 
by sentiment that they would all go to pieces with- 
out it, it is a word not to be used too lightly in 
passing judgment, as if it were an element to be 
thrown out or treated with small consideration. 
The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 



April 23. 

With no vain praise we mock the stone-carved 
name 
Stamped once on dust that moved with pulse 
and breath, 
As thinking to enlarge that amplest fame 

Whose undimmed glories gild the night of 

death. Shakespeare. 
I think most readers of Shakespeare sometimes 
find themselves thrown into exalted mental con- 
ditions like those produced by music. Then they 
may drop the book, to pass at once into the region 
of thought without words. We may happen to be 
very dull folks, you and I ; . . . but we get glimpses 
now and then of a sphere of spiritual possibilities, 
where we, dull as we are now, may sail in vast cir- 
cles round the largest compass of earthly intelli- 
gence. The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 
♦— 

April 24. 
Land of our fathers, ocean makes us two, 

But heart to heart is true ! 
Proud is your towering daughter in the West, 
Yet in her burning life-blood reign confest 
Her mother's pulses beating in her breast. 
This holy fount, whose rills from heaven descend, 

Its gracious drops shall lend, — 
Both foreheads bathed in that baptismal dew, 
And love make one the old home and the new ! 
Fountain at Stratford-on-Avon. 



April 25. 

I opened it [The Christian Year] to the Fourth 
Sunday in Lent, and read that angelic poem, 
sweeter than anything I can remember since 

Xavier's "My God, I love thee." 1 am not a 

Churchman, but such a poem as " The Rosebud " 
makes one's heart a proselyte to the culture it 
grows from. Talk about it as much as you like, — 
one's breeding shows itself nowhere more than 
in his religion. A man should be a gentleman in 
his hymns and prayers ; the fondness for " scenes," 
among vulgar saints, contrasts so meanly with that: 

" God only and good angels look 
Behind the blissful scene." 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 

April 26. 

Wild flowers are opening fast ; the leaves are 
springing bright green upon the currant bushes ; 
dark, almost livid upon the lilac ; the grass is grow- 
ing apace, the plants are coming up in the garden 
beds, and the children are thinking of May-day. 

The Seasons. 

We have trod from the threshold of turbulent 

March, 
Till the green scarf of April is hung on the larch, 
And down the bright hillside that welcomes the day, 
We hear the warm panting of beautiful May. 

Close of a Course of Lectures. 



April 27. 

A mightier Orpheus strains the whispering wire, 
Whose lightning thrills the lazy winds outrun 
And hold the hours as Joshua stayed the sun, — 
So swift, in truth, we hardly find a place 
For those dim fictions known as time and space. 

The School-Boy. 
The smallest fibres weave the strongest bands ; — 
In narrowest tubes the sovereign nerves are 
spun, — 
A little cord along the deep sea-sands 

Makes the live thought of severed nations one. 
To Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg. 



April 28. 

Those who have been born into the inheritance 
of the new civilization feel very differently about it 
from those who have lived their way into it. To 
the young and those approaching middle age all 
these innovations in life and thought are as natu- 
ral, as much a matter of course, as the air they 
breathe ; they form a part of the inner framework 
of their intelligence, about which their mental life 
is organized. To men and women of more than 
threescore and ten they are external accretions, 
like the shell of a mollusk, the jointed plates of an 
articulate. A Prospective Visit. 



April 29. 

Men's minds are like the pieces on a chess- 
board in their way of moving. One mind creeps 
from the square it is on to the next, straight forward, 
like the pawns. Another sticks close to its own 
line of thought and follows it as far as it goes, 
with no heed for others' opinions, as the bishop 
sweeps the board in the line of his own color. 
And another class of minds break i*;hrough every- 
thing that lies before them, ride over argument 
and opposition, and go to the end of the board, 
like the castle. 

But there is still another sort of intellect which 
is very apt to jump over the thought that stands 
next and come down in the unexpected way of the 
knight. But that same knight will contrive to get 
on to every square of the board in a series of moves 
that looks like a pattern of embroidery, and so these 
zigzagging minds will sooner or later get back to 
the square next the one they started from. 

The Poet at the Breakfast-Tabi e. 
♦ 

April 30. 

At last young Apr'\ ever frail and fair. 
Wooed by her playmate with the golden hair, 
Chased to the margin of receding floods 
O'er the soft meadows starred with opening buds, 
In tears and blushes sighs herself away. 
And hides her cheek beneath the flowers of May. 

Spring. 



a^ap* 



Clear the brown path, to meet his coulter's gleam I 
Lo ! on he comes, behind his smoking team, 
With toil's bright dew-drops on his sun-burnt 

brow, 
The lord of earth, the hero of the plough ! 

First in the field before the reddening sun, 
Last in the shadows when the day is done, 
Line after line, along the bursting sod, 
Marks the broad acres where his feet have trod; 
Still, where he treads, the stubborn clods divide, 
The smooth, fresh furrow opens deep and wide ; 
Matted and dense the tangled turf upheaves, 
Mellow and dark the ridgy cornfield cleaves ; . . . 
At every turn the loosening chains resound, 
The swinging ploughshare circles glistening round 
Till the wide field one billowy waste appears. 
And wearied hands unbind the panting steers. 

These are the hands whose sturdy labor brings 
The peasant's food, the golden pomp of kings ; 
This is the page, whose letters shall be seen 
Changed by the sun to words of living green ; 
This is the scholar whose immortal pen 
Spells the first lesson hunger taught to men. 

The Ploughman. 



May I. 

Wild filly from the mountain side, 

Doomed to the close and chafing thills, 

Lend me thy long, untiring stride 
To seek with thee thy western hills I 

I hear the whispering voice of Spring, 
The thrush's trill, the robin's cry, 

Like some poor bird with prisoned wing 
That sits and sings, but longs to fly. 

O for one spot of living green, — 

One little spot where leaves can grow,— 

To love unblamed, to walk unseen. 
To dream above, to sleep below ! 

Spring Has Comb. 



May 2. 



The flowering month of the orchard. As the 
warmth flows northward like a great wave, it cov- 
ers the land with an ever-spreading flood of pink 
and white blossoms. The Seasons. 

Why dream I here within these caging walls. 
Deaf to her voice, while blooming Nature calls ; 
Peering and gazing with insatiate looks 
Through blinding lenses, or in wearying books ? 

Spring. 

Palfrey, ordained in varied walks to shine, 
Statesman, historian, critic, and divine. 

Poem for the Harvard Anniversary. 



May 3. 

You don't know what I mean by the green state i 
Well, then, I will tell you. Certain things are good 
for nothing until they have been kept a long while ; 
and some are good for nothing until they have 
been long kept and used. Of the first, wine is the 
illustrious and immortal example. Of those which 
must be kept and used I will name three, — meer- 
schaum pipes, violins, and poems. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 

May 4. 

Even so late as less than half a century ago this 
region of Boston was still a most attractive little 
rzts m urbe. Sunny gardens opened their flowers 
and ripened their fruits in the places now occu- 
pied by great warehouses. The most aristocratic 
pears, the " Saint Michael," the " Brown Bury," 
found their natural homes in these sheltered in- 
closures. The fine old mansion of Judge William 
Prescott looked out upon these gardens. Some 
of us can well remember the window of his son's, 
the historian's, study, the light from which used 
every evening to glimmer through the leaves of 
the pear-trees while " The Conquest of Mexico" 
was achieving itself under difficulties hardly less 
formidable than those encountered by Cortes. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson. 



May 5. 

A great calamity is as old as the trilobites an 
hour after it has happened. It stains backward 
through all the leaves we have turned over in the 
book of life, before its blot of tears or of blood is 
dry on the page we are turning. For this we seem 
to have lived ; it was foreshadowed in dreams ; in 
the " dissolving views " of dark day-visions ; all 
omens pointed to it ; all paths led to it. After the 
tossing half-forgetfulness of the first sleep that fol- 
lows such an event, it comes upon us afresh, as a 
surprise, at waking ; in a few moments it is old 
again, — old as eternity. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



May 6. 



I am not humble ; I was shown my place, 
Clad in such robes as Nature had at hand ; 
Took what she gave, not chose, I know no shame, 
No fear for being simply what I am. 

I am not proud, I hold my every breath 
At Nature's mercy. I am as a babe 
Borne in a giant's arms, he knows not where ; 
Each several heart-beat, counted like the coin 
A miser reckons, is a special gift 
As from an unseen hand. 

Wind-Clouds and Star-Dkifts. 



May 7, 

A poem must be kept and used, like a meer- 
schaum, or a violin. A poem is just as porous as 
the meerschaum ; — the more porous it is the bet- 
ter. I mean to say that a genuine poem is capa- 
ble of absorbing an indefinite amount of the es- 
sence of our own humanity, — its tenderness, its 
heroism, its regrets, its aspirations, so as to be 
gradually stained through with a divine secondary 
color derived from ourselves. So you see it must 
take time to bring the sentiment of a poem into 
harmony with our nature, by staining ourselves 
through every thought and image our being can 
penetrate. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 

May 8. 

When a word comes up fit to end a line with I 
can feel all the rhymes in the language that are fit 
to go with it without naming them. I have tried 
them all so many times, I know all the polygamous 
words and all the monogamous ones, and all the 
unmarrying ones, — the whole lot that have no 
mates, — as soon as I hear their names called. 
Sometimes I run over a string of rhymes, but 
generally speaking it is strange what a short list it 
is of those that are .good for anything. That is 
the pitiful side of all rhymed verse. 

The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 



May 9. 

Ah, it is the pale passions that are the fiercest, — 
it is the violence of the chill that gives the meas- 
ure of the fever ! The fighting-boy of our school 
always turned white when he went out to a pitched 
battle with the bully of some neighboring village ; 
but w^e knew what his bloodless cheeks meant, — 
the blood was all in his stout heart, — he was a 
slight boy, and there was not enough to redden his 
face and fill his heart both at once. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 



May 10. 

The city slept beneath the moonbeam's glance. 
Her white walls gleaming through the vines of 

France, 
' And all was hushed, save where the footsteps fell, 
On some high tower, of midnight sentinel. 
But one still watched ; no self-encircled woes 
Chased from his lids the angel of repose ; 
He watched, he wept, for thoughts of bitter years 
Bowed his dark lashes, wet with burning tears ; 
His country's sufferings and her children's shame 
Streamed o'er his memory like a forest's flame ; 
Each treasured insult, each remembered wrong, 
Rolled through his heart and kindled into song ; 
His taper faded ; and the morning gales 
Swept through the world the war-song of Mar- 
seilles ! Poetry. 



May II. 

There 's so much intelligence about nowadays 
in books and newspapers and talk that it 's mighty 
hard to write without getting something or other 
worth listening to into your essay or your volume. 
The foolishest book is a kind of leaky boat on a 
sea of wisdom ; some of the wisdom will get in 
anyhow. Every now and then I find something in 
my book that seems so good to me, I can't help 
thinking it must have leaked in. I suppose other 
people discover that it came through a leak, full as 
soon as I do. 

You must write a book or two to find out how 
much and how little you know and have to say. 
Then you must read some notices of it by some- 
body that loves you and one or two by somebody 
that hates you. You '11 find yourself a very odd 
piece of property after you've been through these 
experiences. Thk Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 
— ^—— 

May 12. 

Once more revived in fancy's magic glass, 
I see in state the long procession pass : 
Tall, courtly, leader as by right divine, 
Winthrop, our Winthrop, rules the marshalled 

line. 
Still seen in front, as on that far-off day 
His ribboned baton showed the column's way. 
The Second Centennial. 
(Poem/or the Harvard A nniversary.) 



May 13. 

The world is always ready to receive talent with 
open arms. Very often it does not know what to 
do with genius. Talent is a docile creature. It bows 
its head meekly while the world slips the collar 
over it. It backs into the shafts like a lamb. It 
draws its load cheerfully, and is patient of the bit 
and of the whip. But genius is always impatient 
of its harness ; its wild blood makes it hard to 
tram. The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 



May 14. 

Proud of her clustering spires, her new-built tow- 
ers, 
Our Venice, stolen from the slumbering sea, 
A sister's kindliest greeting wafts to thee. 

Rose of Val d' Arno, Queen of all its flowers ! 

Thine exile's shrine thy sorrowing love embowers, 
Yet none with truer homage bends the knee, 
Or stronger pledge of fealty brings than we, 

Whose poets make thy dead Immortal ours. 

Lonely the height, but ah, to heaven how near ! 
Dante whence flowed that solemn verse of thine 
Like the stem river from its Apennine 

'Vhose name the far-off vScythian thrilled with 
fear : 

Now to all lands thy deep-toned voice is dear, 
And every language knows the Song Divine ! 
Boston to Florence. 



May 15. 

I will tell you what I have found spoil more 
good talks than anything else ; — long arguments 
on special points between people who differ on 
the fundamental principles upon which these points 
depend. 

No men can have satisfactory relations with each 
other until they have agreed on certain ultimata 
of belief not to be disturbed in ordinary conversa- 
tion, and unless they have sense enough to trace 
the secondary questions depending upon these ul- 
timate beliefs to their source. In short, just as a 
written constitution is essential to the best social 
order, so a code of finalities is a necessary condi- 
tion of profitable talk between two persons. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 

May 16. 

A man's opinions are generally of much more 
value than his arguments. These last are made 
by his brain, and perhaps he does not believe the 
proposition they tend to prove, — as is often the 
case with paid lawyers ; but opinions are formed 
by our whole nature, — brain, heart, instinct, brute 
life, everything all our experience has shaped for 
us by contact with the whole circle of our being. 
The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 



May 17. 

Thou wilt not hold in scorn the child who dares 
Look up to Thee, the Father, — dares to ask 
More than Thy wisdom answers. From Thy hand 
The worlds were cast ; yet every leaflet claims 
From that same hand its little shining sphere 
Of star-lit dew ; thine image, the great sun, 
Girt with his mantle of tempestuous flame, 
Glares in mid-heaven ; but to his noontide blaze 
The slender violet lifts its lidless eye, 
And from his splendor steals its fairest hue, 
Its sweetest perfume from the scorching fire. 

Wind-Clouds and Stak-Drifts. 



May 18. 

We are all more or less improvisators. We 
all have a double, who is wiser and better than we 
are, and who puts thoughts into our heads, and 
words into our mouths. Do we not all commune 
with our own hearts upon our beds ? Do we not 
all divide ourselves, and go to buffets on questions 
of right or wrong, of wisdom or folly ? Who or what 
is it that resolves the stately parliament of the day, 
with all its forms and conventionalities and pre- 
tences, and the great Me presiding, into the com- 
mittee of the whole, with Conscience in the chair, 
that holds its solemn session through the watches 
of the night ? 

Mechanism in Thought and Morals. 



May 19. 

These are the pleasant Berkshire hills, 

Each with its leafy crown ; 
Hark ! from their sides a thousand rills 

Come singing sweetly down. 

A thousand rills ; they leap and shine, 
Strained through the shadowy nooks, 

Till, clasped in many a gathering twine. 
They swell a hundred brooks. 

A hundred brooks and still they run 
With ripple, shade, and gleam. 

Till, clustering all their braids in one. 
They flow a single stream. 

After a Lecture on Wordsworth. 



May 20. 

A very simple intellectual mechanism answers 
the necessities of friendship, and even of the most 
intimate relations of life. If a watch tells us the 
hour and minute, we can be content to carry it 
about with us for a lifetime, though it has no sec- 
ond hand and is not a repeater, nor a musical 
watch, — though it is not enamelled nor jewelled, 
— in short, though it has little beyond the wheels 
required for a trustworthy instrument, added to a 
good face and a pair of useful hands. 

The Autocrat of the Break fast-Tablk. 



May 21. 

Fresh transfused, the Iliad thrills again 
From Albion's cliffs as o'er Achaia's plain ! 
The proud heroic, with its pulse-like beat, 
Rings like the cymbals clashing as they meet. 

Poetry. 



May 2 2. 

In Windsor Park . . . was the lovely sight of the 
hawthorn in full bloom. I had always thought of 
the hawthorn as a pretty shrub, growing in hedges ; 
as big as a barberry bush, or some humble plant of 
that character. I was surprised to see it as a tree, 
standing by itself, and making the most delicious 
roof a pair of young lovers could imagine to sit 
under. It looked at a little distance like a young 
apple-tree covered with new-fallen snow. I shall 
never see the word hawthorn in poetry again with- 
out the image of the snowy but far from chilling 
canopy rising before me. 

In this way it is that the associations with the 
poetry we remember come up when we find our- 
selves surrounded by English scenery. The great 
poets build temples of song, and fill them with 
images and symbols which move us almost to 
adoration ; the lesser minstrels fill a panel or gild 
a cornice here and there, and make our hearts glad 
with glimpses of beauty. 

Our Hundred Days in Europe. 



May 23. 

Sitting on the girls' benches, conspicuous by 
that look which rarely fails to betray hereditary 
and congenital culture, was a young person very 
nearly of my own age. This was Margaret Fuller, 
the only one among us who, like " Jean Paul," like 
*' The Duke," like " Bettina," has slipped the cable 
of the more distinctive name to which she was 
anchored, and floats on the waves of speech, as 
" Margaret." Her air to her schoolmates was 
marked by a certain stateliness and distance, as if 
she had other thoughts than theirs and was not of 
them. ... Her talk was affluent, magisterial, de 
hauten bas, some would say euphuistic, but surpass- 
ing the talk of women in breadth and audacity. 
Her face kindled and reddened and dilated in 
every feature as she spoke. 

Cinders from the Ashes. 

A woman who is likely to live longer by what is 
written of her than by anything she ever wrote her- 
self. Ralph Waldo Emerson. 
♦ 

May 24. 

God bless our Father's Landl 
Keep her in heart and hand 

One with our own ! 
From all her foes defend. 
Be her brave People's Friend, 
On all her realms descend, 

Protect her Throne ! 

International Odb. 



May 25. 

Why that ethereal spirit's frame describe ? 
You know the race-marks of the Brahmin tribe, — 
The spare, slight form, the slopiiig shoulders' 

droop. 
The calm, scholastic air, the clerkly stoop. 
The lines of thought the narrowed features wear, 
Carved by the edge of keen New England air. . . . 

Where in the realm of thought, whose air is song, 
Does he, the Buddha of the West, belong ? 
He seems a winged Franklin, sweetly wise, 
Born to unlock the secrets of the skies. . . . 
If lost at times in vague aerial flights, 
None treads with firmer footstep when he lights ; 
A soaring nature, ballasted with sense. 
Wisdom without her wrinkles or pretence. 

At the Saturday Club. 



May 26. 

I cannot remember the time when the lilacs 
were not in blow on Election-day, — the last 
Wednesday in May. A bunch of " laylocks " and 
a 'lection bun used to make us happy in old times ; 
but 'lection-days are over, and we have no festival 
of the lilacs, which the old anniversary was, with- 
out knowing it. " Artillery Election," with its lan- 
guid pageantry and its sermon obligato, is not to be 
counted. The Seasons. 



May 27. 

The home of my childhood comes back as a vis- 
ion, — 
Hark ! Hark ! A soft chord from its song- 
haunted room, — 
'T is a morning of May, when the air is Elysian, — 
The syringa in bud and the lilac in bloom. 

The tell-tales of memory wake from their slum- 
bers, — 
I hear the old song with its tender refrain, — 
What passion lies hid in those honey-voiced num- 
bers! 
What perfume of youth in each exquisite strain ! 
For the Moore Centennial Celebration. 
• 

May 28. 
The great Professor, strong, broad-shouldered, 

square, 
In life's rich noontide, joyous, debonair. 
His social hour no leaden care alloys, 
His laugh rings loud and mirthful as a boy's, 
That lusty laugh the Puritan forgot. 
What ear has heard it and remembers not ? . . . 

How does vast Nature lead her living train 
In ordered sequence through that spacious brain, 
As in the primal hour when Adam named 
The new-born tribes that young creation claimed ? — 
How will her realm be darkened, losing thee, 
Her darling, whom we call our Agassiz ! 

At the Saturday Club. 



May 29. 

Not with the anguish of hearts that are breaking 

Come we as mourners to weep for our dead ; 
Grief in our breasts has grown weary of aching, 

Green is the turf where our tears we have 
shed. . . . 
Hushed are their battle-fields, ended their marches, 

Deaf are their ears to the drum-beat of morn, — 
Rise from the sod, ye fair columns and arches ! 

Tell their bright deeds to the ages unborn ! 
Emblem and legend may fade from the portal, 

Keystone may crumble and pillar may fall ; 
They were the builders whose work is immortal, 

Crowned with the dome that is over us all ! 
Laving of the Corner-Stone of Harvard Memorial 
Hall. 

♦— 

May 30. 

For our own, our loved and lost, we bring 
With throbbing hearts and tears that still must 

flow. 
In full-heaped hands, the opening flowers of spring, 
Lilies half-blown, and budding roses, red 
As their young cheeks, before the blood was shed 
That lent their morning bloom its generous glow. 

King's Chapel. 



May 31. 

The roses are getting ready to light up the glori- 
ous summer which is close upon us, and the yellow- 
birds have been flashing about for the last week 
and more, and a few days ago, as if to remind us 
that even at the sweetest season our earth is no 
longer paradise, a mosquito blew his little horn, 
and stabbed one of us with his poisoned dagger. 
To-morrow June will be here. The Seasons. 

Not his beneath the blood-red star 
To win the soldier's envied scar ; 
Unarmed he battled for the right, 
In Duty's never-ending fight. 

Unconquered will, unslumbering eye, 
Faith such as bids the martyr die. 
The prophet's glance, the master's hand 
To mould the work his foresight planned. 

Lo, thus he stood ; in danger's strait 
The pilot of the Pilgrim State ! 
Too large his fame for her alone, — 
A nation claims him as her own ! 

Inauguration of the Statue of Gov. Andrew. 



9iune. 



Then bursts the song from every leafy glade, 
The yielding season's bridal serenade ; 
Then flash the wings returning Summer calls 
Through the deep arches of her forest halls, — 
The bluebird, breathing from his azure plumes 
The fragrance borrowed where the myrtle blooms ; 
The thrush, poor wanderer, dropping meekly down, 
Clad in his remnant of autumnal brown ; 
The oriole, drifting like a flake of fire 
Rent by a whirlwind from a blazing spire. 
The robin jerking his spasmodic throat. 
Repeats, imperious, his staccato note ; 
The crack-brained bobolink courts his crazy mate. 
Poised on a bulrush tipsy with his weight ; 
Nay, in his cage the lone canary sings, 
Feels the soft air, and spreads his idle wings. 

Spring. 



June i. 

Kiss mine eyelids, beauteous Mom, 
Blushing into life new-born ! 
Lend me violets for my hair, 
And thy russet robe to wear, 
And thy ring of rosiest hue 
Set in drops of diamond dew ! . . , 

Kiss my lips, thou Lord of light. 
Kiss my lips a soft good-night ! 
Westward sinks thy golden car ; 
Leave me but the evening star. 
And my solace that shall be, 
Borrowing all its light from thee ! 

Fantasia. 



June 2. 

Do you ever wonder why poets talk so much 
about flowers ? Did you ever hear of a poet who 
did not talk about them ? Don't you think a 
poem, which, for the sake of being original should 
leave them out, would be like those verses where 
the letter a ox e ox some other is omitted ? No, — 
they will bloom over and over again in poems as 
in the summer fields, to the end of time, always 
old and always new. Why should we be more 
shy of repeating ourselves than the spring be tired 
of blossoms or the night of stars ? 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast- Table. 



June 3. 

I never wrote a " good " line in my life but the 
moment after it was written it seemed a hundred 
years old. Very commonly I had a sudden con- 
viction that I had seen it somewhere. Possibly I 
may have sometimes unconsciously stolen it, but 
I do not remember that I ever once detected any 
historical truth in these sudden convictions of the 
antiquity of my new thought or phrase. I have 
learned utterly to distrust them, and never allow 
them to bully me out of a thought or line. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



June 4. 

Before we sighed, our griefs were told ; 

Before we smiled, our joys were sung ; 
And all our passions shaped of old 

In accents lost to mortal tongue. 

In vain a fresher mould we seek, — 

Can all the varied phrases tell 
That Babel's wandermg children speak 

How thrushes sing or lilacs smell .-* 

Caged in the poet's lonely heart, 

Love wastes unheard its tenderest tone ; 

The soul that sings must dwell apart, 
Its inward melodies unknown. 

To My Readers. 



June 5. 

It was now the season of singing-birds, and the 
woods were haunted with mysterious, tender music. 
The voices of the birds which love the deeper 
shades of the forest are sadder than those of the 
open fields : these are the nuns who have taken 
the veil, the hermits that have hidden themselves 
away from the world and tell their griefs to the in- 
finite listening Silences of the wilderness, — for 
the one deep inner silence that Nature breaks with 
her fitful superficial sounds becomes multiplied as 
the image of a star in ruffled waters. 

Elsie Venner. 



June 6. 

And I remember, — well-a-day ! — 
Thy full-blown summer roundelay, 
As when behind a broidered screen 
Some holy maiden sings unseen : 
With answering notes the woodland rung, 
And every tree-top found a tongue. 

An Old-Year Song. 

And hark ! and hark ! the woodland rings ; 

There thrilled the thrush's soul : 
And look ! that flash of flamy wings, — 

The fire-plumed oriole ! 

After a Lecture on Wordsworth. 



June 7. 

I suppose every day of earth, with its hundred 
thousand deaths and something more of births, — 
with its loves and hates, its triumphs and defeats, 
its pangs and blisses, has more of humanity in it 
than all the books that were ever written, put to- 
gether. I believe the flowers growing at this mo- 
ment send up more fragrance to heaven than was 
ever exhaled from all the essences ever distilled. 
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



June 8. 

What blending thoughts our memories share I 

What visions yours and mine 
Of May-days in whose morning air 

The dews were golden wine, 

Of vistas bright with opening day, 
Whose all-awakening sun • 

Showed in life's landscape, far away, 
The summits to be won! 

The heights are gained. — Ah, say not so 

For him who smiles at time, 
Leaves his tired comrades down below, 
And only lives to climb ! 

To James Freeman Clarke. 
1880. 



June 9. 

But now the roses are coining into bloom ; the 
azalea, wild honeysuckle, is sweetening the hill- 
sides ; the laurels are beginning to blow ; the white 
lilies are getting ready to open ; the fireflies are 
seen now and then, flitting across the darkness ; 
the katydids, the grasshoppers, the crickets, make 
themselves heard; the bullfrogs utter their tre- 
mendous voices, and the full chorus of birds makes 
the air vocal with its melody. The Seasons. 

Heaven must surely find the earth in tune 
When Home, sweet Home, exhales the breath of 
June. To James Russell Lowell. 

June 10. 

With softer gales the opening leaves are fanned, 
With fairer hues the kindling flowers expand, 
The rose-bush reddens with the blush of June, 
The groves are vocal with their minstrels' tune, 
The mighty elm, beneath whose arching shade 
The wandering children of the forest strayed. 
Greets the bright morning in its bridal dress. 
And spreads its arms the gladsome dawn to bless. 

The School-Boy. 
Well, Time alone can lift the future's curtain, — 

Science may teach our children all she knows. 
But love will kindle fresh young hearts, 't is certain, 

And June will not forget her blushing rose. 

The Coming Era. 



June ii. 

Trained in the holy art whose lifted shield 
Wards off the darts a never-slumbering foe, 
By hearth and wayside lurking, waits to throw, 
Oppression taught his helpful arm to wield 
The slayer's weapon : on the murderous field 
The fiery bolt he challenged laid him low. 
Seeking its noblest victim. Even so 
The charter of a nation must be sealed ! 
The healer's brow the hero's honors crowned, 
From lowliest duty called to loftiest deed. 
Living, the oak-leaf wreath his temples bound ; 
Dying, the conqueror's laurel was his meed, 
Last on the broken rampart's turf to bleed 
Where Freedom's victory in defeat was found. 
Joseph Warren, M. D. 
Jufie II, 1873. 

• 

June 12. 

Put an idea into your intelligence and leave it 
there an hour, a day, a year, without ever having 
occasion to refer to it. When, at last, you return 
to it, you do not find it as it was when acquired. 
It has domiciliated itself, so to speak, — become 
at home, entered into relations with your other 
thoughts, and integrated itself with the whole fab- 
ric of the mind. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



June 13. 

Memory, imagination, old sentiments, and asso- 
ciations are more readily reached through the sense 
of the smell than by almost any other channel. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast- Table. 

Our hearts are held down to our homes by in- 
numerable trivial fibres, but Gulliver was fixed to 
the soil, you remember, by pinning his head a hair 
at a time. The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 



June 14. 

Sister, we bid you welcome, — we who stand 

On the high table-land ; 
We who have climbed life's slippery Alpine slope, 
And rest, still leaning on the staff of hope. 
Looking along the silent Mer de Glace, 
Leading our footsteps where the dark crevasse 
Yawns in the frozen sea we all must pass, — 

Sister, we clasp your hand ! 

Thrice welcome ! shining names our missals show 

Amid their rubrics' glow, 
But search the blazoned record's starry line. 
What halo's radiance fills the page like thine ? 
Thou who by some celestial clew couldst find 
The way to all the hearts of all mankind, 
On thee, already canonized, enshrined, 

What more can Heaven bestow ? 

At the Summit. 
yung 14, 1882. 



June 15. 

Beneath each swinging forest-bough 

Some arm as stout in death reposes, — 
From wave-washed foot to heaven-kissed brow 

Her valor's life-blood runs in roses ; 
Nay, let our brothers of the West 

Write smiling in their florid pages, 
One half her soil has walked the rest 

In poets, heroes, martyrs, sages ! 

In earth's broad temple where we stand, 

Fanned by the eastern gales that brought us, 
We hold the missal in our hand, 

Bright with the lines our Mother taught us. 
Where'er its blazoned page betrays 

The glistening links of gilded fetters. 
Behold, the half-turned leaf displays 

Her rubric stained in crimson letters! 

A Good Time Going. 
♦ 

June 16. 

The laurels were just coming into bloom, — the 
yellow lilies, earlier than their fairer sisters, pushing 
their golden cups through the water, not content, 
like those, to float on the surface of the stream 
that fed them, emblems of showy wealth, and like 
that, drawing all manner of insects to feed upon 
them. The miniature forests of ferns came down 
to the edge of the stream, their tall, bending 
plumes swaying in the breeze. 

The Guardian Angel. 



June 17. 

With brazen trumpets blaring, the flames behind 
them glaring, 

The deadly wall before them, in close array they 
come ; 

Still onward, upward toiling, like a dragon's fold 
uncoiling, — 

Like the rattlesnake's shrill warning the reverber- 
ating drum ! 

Over heaps all torn and gory, — shall I tell the 

fearful story. 
How they surged above the breastwork, as a sea 

breaks over a deck ; 
How, driven, yet scarce defeated, our worn-out 

men retreated, 
With their powder-horns all emptied, like the 

swimmers from a wreck ? 
Grandmother's Story of Bunker-Hill Battle. 

June 18. 

O gracious Mother, whose benignant breast 
Wakes us to life, and lulls us all to rest, 
How thy sweet features, kind to every clime, 
Mock with their smile the wrinkled front of time ! 
We stain thy flowers — they blossom o'er the dead ; 
We rend thy bosom, and it gives us bread ; . . . 
Our maddening conflicts scar thy fairest plain, 
Still thy soft answer is the growing grain. 

The Ploughman. 



June 19. 

Pascal and Edwards were alike sensitive, pure in 
heart and in life, profoundly penetrated with the 
awful meaning of human existence ; both filled 
with a sense of their own littleness and sinful- 
ness ; both singularly powerful as controversialists. 
. . . Pascal was a true poet who did not care to 
wear the singing robes. His prose is light and elas- 
tic everywhere with esprit ; much of that of Ed- 
wards reminds us of the unleavened bread of the 
Israelite : holy it may be, but heavy it certainly is. 
The exquisite wit which so delights us in Pascal 
could not be claimed for Edwards ; yet he could 
be satirical in a way to make the gravest person 
smile. . . . Both had the same fondness for writ- 
ing in the form of aphorisms, — natural to strong 
thinkers, who act like the bankers whose habit it 
is to sign checks, but not to count out money. 

Jonathan Edwards. 

June 20. 

The bom soldier, fate decreed to wreak 
His martial manhood on a class in Greek, 
Popkin ! How that explosive name recalls 
The grand old Busby of our ancient halls ! 
Such faces looked from Skippon's grim platoons, 
Such figures rode with Ireton's stout dragoons ; 
He gave his strength to learning's gentle charms, 
But every accent sounded " Shoulder arms ! " 

Vestigia Quinque Retroksum. 



June 21. 
At last come the strawberries, of which Wal- 
ton quotes from Dr. Boteler the famous saying, 
" Doubtless God could have made a better berry, 
but doubtless God never did." When they have 
ripened in our own gardens, summer has begun, 
hai'dly till then ; and they mark pretty nearly the 
true astronomical beginning of the season. 

The Seasons. 
—4 

June 22. 

The manifold delicious, mysterious impressions 
of that wondef ul June night. The stars were shin- 
ing between the tall trees, as if all the jewels of 
heaven had been set in one belt of midnight sky. 
The voices of the wind, as they sighed through 
the pines, seemed like the breath of a sleeping 
child, and then, as they lisped from the soft, ten- 
der leaves of beeches and maples, like the half -ar- 
ticulate whisper of the mother hushing all the in- 
trusive sounds that might awaken it. 

Then came the pulsating monotone of the frogs 
from a far-off pool, the harsh cry of an owl from 
an old tree that overhung it, the splash of a mink 
or musquash, and nearer by, the light step of a 
woodchuck . . . Sweet odors from oozing pines, 
from dewy flowers, from spicy leaves stole out of 
the tangled thickets, and made the whole scene 
more dream-like with their faint, mingled sugges- 
tions. The Guardian Anghl. 



June 23. 

Firm were their hearts in danger's hour, 
Sweet was their manhood's morning flower, 
Their hopes with rainbow hues were bright, 
How swiftly winged the sudden night 1 

O Mother ! on thy marble page 
Thy children read, from age to age, 
The mighty word that upward leads 
Through noble thought to nobler deeds. 

Truth, heaven-born Truth, their fearless guide, 
Thy saints have lived, thy heroes died. 
Our love has reared their earthly shrine, 
Their glory be forever thine ! 

Dedication of Harvard Memorial Hall. 
June 23, 1874. 



June 24. 

This dust, once breathing, changed its joyous life 
For toil and hunger, wounds and mortal strife ; 
Love, friendship, learning's all-prevailing charms, 
For the cold bivouac and the clash of arms. 

Poem for the Harvard Anniversary. 
Ah, who shall count a rescued nation's debt, 

Or sum in words our martyrs' silent claims ? 
Who shall our heroes' dread exchange forget, — 
All life, youth, hope, could promise to allure 
For all that soul could brave or flesh endure .'' 

They shaped our future ; we but carve their 
names. King's Chapel. 



June 25. 

We find her at her stately door, and in her ancient 

chair, 
Dressed in the robes of red and green she always 

loved to wear. 
Her eye has all its radiant youth, her cheek its 

morning flame ; 
We drop our roses as we go, hers flourish still the 

same. 
Meeting of the Alumni of Harvard College. 



June 26. 

If one would dream of being remembered by 
coming generations, what monument so enduring 
as a college building that shall bear his name, and 
even when its solid masonry shall crumble give 
place to another still charged with the same sacred 
duty of perpetuating his remembrance. Who was 
Sir Matthew Holworthy, that his name is a house- 
hold word on the lips of thousands of scholars, 
and will be centuries hence, as that of Walter da 
Merton, dead six hundred years ago is to-day at 
Oxford.? Who was Mistress Holden, that she 
should be blessed among women by having her 
name spoken gratefully and the little edifice she 
caused to be erected preserved as her monument 
from generation to generation ? 

The Poet at the Breakfast-Tablb. 



June 27. 

Come while the rose is red, — 

While blue-eyed Summer smiles 
On the green ripples round yon sunken piles 
Washed by the moon-wave warm from Indian isles, 

And on the sultry air 
The chestnuts spread their palms like holy men in 
prayer I Musa. 



June 28. 

The rare joys, the infinite delights, that intoxi- 
cate me on some sweet June morning, when the 
river and bay are smooth as a sheet of beryl-green 
silk, and I run along ripping it up with my knife- 
edged shell of a boat, the rent closing after me 
like those wounds of angels which Milton tells us 
of, but the seam still shining for many a long 
rood behind me. . . . To take shelter from the 
sunbeams under one of the thousand-footed 
bridges, and look down its interminable colonnades, 
while overhead streams and thunders that other 
river whose every wave is a human soul flowing to 
eternity as the river below flows to the ocean, — 
lying there moored unseen, in loneliness so pro- 
found that the columns of Tadmor in the Desert 
could not seem more remote from life, — the cool 
breeze on one's forehead, the stream whispering 
against the half-sunken pillars. 

The Autocrat of the Break fast-Tabls. 



June 29. 

Come, dear old comrade, you and I 
"Will steal an hour from days gone by, 
The shining days when life was new, 
And all was bright with morning dew, 
The lusty days of long ago, 
When you were Bill and I was Joe. 

Bill and Job. 
And be his titles what they will, 

In spite of manhood's claim. 
The graybeard is a school-boy still, 

And loves his school-boy name ; 
It calms the ruler's stormy breast 

Whom hurrying care pursues, 
And brings a sense of peace and rest, 

Like slippers after shoes. 

The Fountain of Youth. 

June 30. 

These blessed days are waning all too fast. 
And June's bright visions mingling with the past ; 
Lilacs have bloomed ajjid faded, and the rose 
Has dropped its petals, but the clover blows. 
And fills its slender tubes with honeyed sweets ; 
The fields are pearled with milk-white margarites ; 
The dandelion, which you sang of old, 
Has lost its pride of place, its crown of gold. 
But still displays its feathery-mantled globe, 
Which children's breath, or wandering winds un« 
robe. To James Russell Lowell. 



Sulp. 



Here I sweep these foolish leaves away, 
I will not crush my brains to-day ! 
Look ! are the southern curtains drawn ? 
Fetch me a fan, and so begone ! 

Not that, — the palm-tree's rustling leaf 
Brought from a parching coral-reef ! 
Its breath is heated ; — I would swing 
The broad gray plumes, — the eagle's wing. 

I hate these roses' feverish blood ! — 
Pluck me a half-blown lily-bud, 
A long-stemmed lily from the lake, 
Cold as a coiling water-snake. 

Rain me sweet odors on the air, 
And wheel me up my Indian chair, 
And spread some book not overwise 
Flat out before my sleepy eyes. 

— Who knows it not, — this dead recoil 
Of weary fibres stretched with toil, — 
The pulse that flutters faint and low 
When Summer's seething breezes blow ! 

Midsummer. 



July i. 

What should decide one in choosing a summer 
residence ? — Constitution, first of all. Comfort is 
essential to enjoyment. You must cut your cli- 
mate to your constitution, as much as your clothing 
to your shape. After this, consult your taste and 
convenience. But if you would be happy in 
Berkshire, you must carry mountains in your brain ; 
and if you would enjoy Nahant, you must have an 
ocean in your soul. Nature plays at dominos 
with you ; you must match her piece or she will 
never give it up to you. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 

July 2. 

There are three classes of lookers-on at the 
show of Nature who may be distinguished from 
each other. The first set includes the patient 
statisticians. The second consists of the natural 
observers. The third class contains the poets, 
who look at things mainly for their beauty or their 
symbolic uses. 

Everybody studies nature with the poets. Many 
take delight in the discursive observations of the 
rambling naturalist. A few interest themselves in 
the series of facts accumulated by the systematic 
observer. . . . How full every walk in the country 
is of moving and still life, always changing its 
aspect, and always full of new delights when the 
eyes have once been opened. The Seasons. 



July 3. 

Wake in our breasts the living fires, 
The holy faith that warmed our sires. 

Army Hymn. 

I give you all the wShip of State : 
Freedom's last venture is her priceless freight ; 
God speed her, keep her, bless her, while she 

steers 
Amid the breakers of unsounded years. 

The Ship of State. 

July 4. 

But who is he whose massive frame belies 
The maiden shyness of his downcast eyes ? 
Who broods in silence till, by questions pressed, 
Some answer struggles from his laboring breast? 
An artist Nature meant to dwell apart. 
Locked in his studio with a human heart. 
Tracking its caverned passions to their lair, 
And all its throbbing mysteries laying bare. 

Count it no marvel that he broods alone 
Over the heart he studies, — 't is his own ; 
So in his page whatever shape it wear. 
The Essex wizard's shadowed self is there, — 
The great Romancer, hid beneath his veil 
Like the stern preacher of his sombre tale ; 
Virile in strength, yet bashful as a girl. 
Prouder than Hester, sensitive as Pearl. 

At the Saturday Club. 



July 5. 

Hull, Bainbridge, Porter, — where are they ? 

The waves their answer roll, 
" Still bright in memory's sunset ray, -" 

God rest each gallant soul ! " 
A brighter name must dim their light 

With more than noontide ray, 
The Sea-King of the " River Fight," 

The Conqueror of the Bay. 

To Admiral Farragut. 

I glance at the placards on the blank wall I am 
passing, and there I see the colossal head of Bar- 
num, the untiring, inexhaustible, insuperable, ever 
triumphant and jubilant Barnum, who came to his 
atmospheric life less than a year after I began 
breathing the fatal mixture, and still wages Titanic 
battle with his own past superlatives. 

An After-Breakfast Talk. 



July 6. 

The cows are standing mid-leg deep in the pool, 
their tails going with rhythmical regularity, looking 
as we often want to feel, vacant of thought, which 
chases us like lo's gad-fly, meekly unquestioning, 
accepting life as a finality. For the lower creatures 
are limited but absolute affirmations, while man is 
an infinite question. What is its answer ? 

The Seasons. 



July 7. 

Those homelier wildflowers which we call weeds ; 
— yellow japanned buttercups and star-disked dan- 
delions, lying in the grass, like sparks that have 
leaped from the kindling sun of summer ; the pro- 
fuse daisy-like flower which whitens the fields, to 
the great disgust of liberal shepherds, yet seems fair 
to loving eyes, with its button-like mound of gold 
set round with milk-white rays ; the tall-stemmed 
succory, setting its pale blue flowers aflame one 
after another ; the red and white clovers ; the 
broad, flat leaves of the plantain, — " the white 
man's foot," as the Indians called it; — those 
common growths which fling themselves to be 
crushed under our feet and our wheels, making 
themselves so cheap in this perpetual martyrdom 
that we forget each of them is a ray of the Divine 
beauty. The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 
*— 

July 8. 
Green' is the wreath their brows so long have 
worn, — 
The minstrels of the morn, 
Who, while the Orient burned with new-born flame, 
Caught that celestial fire 
And struck a Nation's lyre ! 
These taught the western winds the poet's name ; 
Theirs the first opening buds, the maiden flowers 
of fame ! 

Dedication of the Halleck Monument. 



July 9. 

In the fields the blue succory lights one or two 
blossoms in its chandelier ; it is thrifty, and means 
to have its lamps last, not burn all out at once. In 
the garden the stately hollyhock is practising the 
same economy. 

Is anything more charming, in its way, than an 
old-fashioned single hollyhock, with its pink, or 
white, or yellow, or purple flower, and the little 
pollen powdered tree springing up from the bot- 
tom of the corolla ? A bee should be buzzing in it, 
for a bee is never so deliciously pavilioned as in 
the bell tent of the hollyhock. The Seasons. 



July 10. 

The woods at first convey the impression of pro- 
found repose, and yet, if you watch their ways 
with open ear, you find the life which is in them is 
restless and nervous as that of a woman : the little 
twigs are crossing and twining and separating like 
slender fingers that cannot be still ; the stray leaf 
is to be flattened into its place like a truant curl ; 
the limbs sway and twist, impatient of their con- 
strained attitude ; and the rounded masses of foli- 
age swell upward and subside from time to time 
with long soft sighs, and, it may be, the falling of 
a few rain-drops which had lain hidden among the 
deeper shadows. Elsie Venner. 



July ii. 

No natural Gothic arch compares with that 
formed by two American ehns, where their lofty 
jets of foliage shoot across each other's ascend- 
ing curves, to intermingle their showery flakes of 
green. When one looks through a long double row 
of these, he beholds a temple not built with hands, 
fairer than any rninster, with all its clustered stems 
and fluttering capitals, that ever grew in stone. 
- Elsie Venner. 

July 12. 

What names that plain New England town 
reckons in the roll of its inhabitants ! Soldiers in 
the war of Independence, and their worthy suc- 
cessors in the war of Freedom ; lawyers and states- 
men; ministers; and men of genius such as the 
idealist and poet whose inspiration has kindled 
so many souls ; as the romancer who has given an 
atmosphere to the hard outlines of our stern New 
England ; as that unique individual, half college- 
graduate and half Algonquin, the Robinson Crusoe 
of Walden Pond, who carried out a school-boy 
whim to its full proportions, and told the story of 
Nature in undress as only one who had hidden in 
her bedroom could have told it. . . . 

Its groves, its streams, its houses, are haunted 
by undying memories, and its hillsides and hollows 
are made holy by the dust that is covered by their 
turf. Ralph Waldo Emerson. 



July 13. 

Call him not old, whose visionary brain 
Holds o'er the past its undivided reign. 
For him in vain the envious seasons roll 
Who bears eternal summer in his soul. 
If yet the minstrel's song, the poet's lay, 
Spring with her birds, or children at their play, 
Or maiden's smile, or heavenly dream of art, 
Stir the few life-drops creeping round his heart, 
Turn to the record where his years are told, — 
Count his gray hairs, — they cannot make him old ! 
^ The Old Player. 

July 14. 

There was no honester chronicler than our cler- 
ical Pepys, good, hearty, sweet-souled, fact-loving 
Dr. John Pierce of Brookline, who knew the dates 
of birth and death of the graduates of Harvard, 
starred and unstarred, better, one is tempted to 
say (Hibernice), than they did themselves. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

If we did but know how to question these 
charming old people before it is too late ! About 
ten years, more or less, after the generation in ad- 
vance of our own has all died off, it occurs to us 
all at once, " There ! I can ask my old friend 
what he knows of that picture, which must be a 
Copley ; of that house and its legends about which 
there is such a mystery." . . . Too late ! Too late ! 
The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 



July 15. 

As soon as we are old enough* to take in large 
family histories, we never see an individual in a 
face of any stock we know, but a mosaic copy of a 
pattern, with fragmentary tints from this and that 
ancestor. 

The analysis of a face into its ancestral elements 
requires that it should be examined in the very 
earliest infancy, before it has lost that ancient and 
solemn look it brings with it out of the past eter- 
nity ; and again in that brief space when Life, the 
mighty sculptor, has done his work, and Death, his 
silent servant, lifts the veil and lets us look at the 
marble lines he has wrought so faithfully ; and 
lastly, while a painter who can seize all the traits 
of a countenance is building it up, feature after 
feature, from the slight outline to the finished por- 
trait. The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 
« 

July 16. 

There was one picture on their walls, that of a 
lady, by Sir Joshua, which both of us found very 
captivating. This is what is often happening in 
the visits we make. Some painting by a master 
looks down upon us from its old canvas and leaves 
a lasting copy of itself to be stored in memory's 
picture gallery. These surprises are not so likely 
to happen in the New World as in the Old. 

Our Hundred Days in Europe. 



July 17. 

The old Englfeh pattern of the New England 
mansion-house is Sir Thomas Abney's place, where 
dear good Dr. Watts said prayers for the family, 
and wrote those blessed hymns of his that sing uz 
into consciousness in our cradles, and come back 
to us in sweet, single verses, between the moments 
of wandering and of stupor, when we lie dying, 
and sound over us when we can no longer hear 
them, bringing grateful tears to the hot, aching eyes 
beneath the thick, black veils, and carrying the holy 
calm with them which filled the good man's heart. 
^ Elsie Venner. 

July 18. 

Such people as White of Selborne who love to 
wander in the fields and pick up all the interesting 
facts that come in their way, . . . charming people, 
a little miscellaneous in their gatherings, but with 
eyes in their fingers, so that they spy out every- 
thing curious, and get hold of it as a magnet picks 
out iron filings. The Seasons. 

Gilbert White was not a poet, neither was he a 
great systematic naturalist. But he used his eyes 
on the world about him ; and he found occupation 
and happiness in his daily walks, and won as large 
a measure of immortality within the confines of 
his little village as he could have gained in explor- 
ing the sources of the Nile. 

Our Hundred Days in Europe. 



July 19. 

Women are twice as religious as men ; — all the 
world knows that. Whether they are any better 
in the eyes of Absolute Justice, might be ques- 
tioned ; for the additional religious element sup- 
plied by sex hardly seems to be a matter of praise 
or blame. But in all common aspects they are so 
much above us that we get most of our religion 
from them, — from their teachings, from their ex- 
ample, — above all from their pure affections. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 



July 20. 

T would have a woman as true as Death. At 
the first real lie which works from the heart out- 
ward, she should be tenderly chloroformed into a 
better world, where she can have an angel for a 
governess, and feed on strange fruits which will 
make her all over again, even to her bones and 
marrow. — Whether gifted with the accident of 
beauty or not, she should have been moulded in 
the rose red clay of Love, before the breath of life 
made a moving mortal of her. Love-capacity is a 
congenital endowment ; and I think, after a while 
one gets to know the warm-hued natures it belongs 
to from the pretty pipe-clay counterfeits of them. 
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



July 21. 

I love to hear thine earnest voice, 

Wherever thou art hid, 
Thou testy Httle dogmatist, 

Thou pretty Katydid ! 
Thou mindest me of gentlefolks, — 

Old gentlefolks are they, — 
Thou say'st an undisputed thing 

In such a solemn way. To an Insect. 

July 22. 

Once in a while, even in our Northern cities, 
in a very hot summer's day one may realize by a 
sudden extension in his sphere of consciousness, 
how closely he is shut up for the most part. Do 
you not remember something Hke this ? July, be- 
tween I and 2 P. M., Fahrenheit 96°, or there- 
about. Windows all gaping like the mouths of 
panting dogs. Long, stinging cry of a locust 
comes in from a tree, half a mile off ; had forgot- 
ten there was such a tree. Baby's screams from 
a house several blocks distant ; — never knew 
there were any babies in the neighborhood before. 
Tinman pounding something that clatters dread- 
fully, __ very distinct, but don't remember any tinr 
man's shop near by. Horses stamping on pave- 
ment to get off flies. When you hear these four 
sounds, you may set it down as a warm day. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



July 23. 

Devonshire House, like the other great houses, 
is a museum of paintings, statues, objects of inter- 
est of all sorts. . . . Lord Hartington came in 
while we were there. All the men who are distm- 
guished in political life become familiar to the 
readers of Punch in their caricatures, so that we 
know them at sight. A good caricature, which 
seizes the prominent features and gives them the 
character Nature hinted, but did not fully carry 
out, is a work of genius. Nature herself is a re- 
morseless caricaturist, as our daily intercourse 
with our fellow men and women makes evident to 
us. Hardly an English statesman in bodily pres- 
ence could be mistaken by any of Punch's readers. 
Our Hundred Days in Europe. 



July 24. 

It is a fine thing to be an oracle to which an ap- 
peal is always made in all discussions. The men 
of facts wait their turn in grim silence, with that 
slight tension about the nostrils which the con- 
sciousness of carrying a " settler " in the form of 
a fact or a revolver gives the individual thus armed. 
When a person is really full of information, and 
does not abuse it to crush conversation, his part is 
to that of the real talkers what the instrumental 
accompaniment is in a trio or quartette of vocal- 
ists. The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



July 25. 

That name the kind apostle bore 
Who shames the sullen creeds, 

Not trusting less, but loving more, 
And showing faith by deeds. 

To James Freeman Clarke. 

Heaven rains on every heart. 
But there its showers divide. 
The drops of mercy choosing as they part 
The dark or glowing side. 

One kindly deed may turn 
The fountain of thy soul 
To love's sweet day-star, that shall o'er thee burn 
Long as its currents roll ! 

The Promise. 

July 26. 

There are some people whose rhetoric consists 
of a slight habitual understatement. I often tell 
Mrs. Professor that one of her " I think it 's so's " 
is worth the Bible-oath of all the rest of the house- 
hold that they " know it 's so." When you find 
a person a little better than his word, a little 
more liberal than his promise, a little more than 
borne out in his statement by his facts, a little larger 
in deed than in speech, you recognize a kind of 
eloquence in that person's utterance not laid down 
in Blair or Campbell. Elsie Venner. 



July 27. 

The way to argue down a vice is, not to tell lies 
about it, — to say that it has no attractions, when 
everbody knows that it has, — but rather to let it 
make out its case just as it certainly will in the 
moment of temptation, and then meet it with the 
weapons furnished by the Divine armory. Ithu- 
riel did not spit the toad on his spear, you remem- 
ber, but touched him with it, and the blasted angel 
took the sad glories of his true shape. If he had 
shown fight then, the fair spirits would have known 
how to deal with him. 

The Autocrat of the Break fast-Tablb. 



July 28. 

I think you will find that people who honestly 
mean to be true really contradict themselves much 
more rarely than those who try to be " consistent." 
But a great many things we say can be made to 
appear contradictory simply because they are par- 
tial views of a truth and may often look unlike at 
first, as a front view of a face and its profile often 
do. The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 

In opinions look not always back ; 
Your wake is nothing, mind the coming track : 
Leave what you 've done for what you have to do ; 
Don't be " consistent," but be simply true. 

A Rhymed Lesson. 



July 29. 

Writing or printing is like shooting with a rifle ; 
you may hit the reader's mind, or miss it; — but 
talking is like playing at a mark with the pipe 
of an engine; if it is within reach, and you have 
time enough, you can't help hitting it. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 

I have often observed that vulgar persons and 
public audiences of inferior collective intelligence 
have this in common : the least thing draws oflf 
their minds, when you are speaking to them. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 



July 30. 

Nobody talks much that does n't say unwise 
things, — things he did not mean to say; as no 
person plays much without striking a false note 
sometimes. Talk, to me, is only spading up the 
ground, for crops of thought. I can't answer for 
what will turn up. If I could, it wouldn't be 
talking but " speaking my piece." Better, I think, 
the hearty abandonment of one's self to the sug- 
gestions of the moment, at the risk of an occa- 
sional slip of the tongue, perceived the instant it 
escapes but just one syllable too late, than the 
royal reputation of never saying a foolish thing. 
The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 



July 31. 

In candent ire the solar splendor flames ; 
The foles, languescent pend from arid rames j 
His humid front the cive, anheling, wipes, 
And dreams of erring on ventiferous ripes. 

How dulce to vive occult to mortal eyes, 
Dorm on the herb with none to supervise, 
Carp the suave berries from the crescent vine, 
And bibe the flow from longicaudate kine 1 

To me, alas ! no verdurous visions come, 
Save yon exiguous pool's conferva-scum, — 
No concave vast repeats the tender hue 
That laves my milk-jug with celestial blue ! 

Me wretched ! Let me curr to quercine shades I 
Effund your albid hausts, lactiferous maids ! 
O, might I vole to some umbrageous clump, — 
Depart, — be off, — excede, — evade, — erumpi 

iEsTIVATION. 

An unpublished poem, by my late Latin tutor. 



aiugujs^t. 



So onward, o'er the rugged way 
That runs through rocks and sand, 

Showered by the tempest-driven spray, 
From bays on either hand, 

That shut between their outstretched arms 

The crews of Marblehead, 
The lords of ocean's watery farms. 

Who plough the waves for bread. 

How fair the azure fields in sight 

Before the low-browed inn ! 
The tumbling billows fringe with light 

The crescent shore of Lynn ; 

Nahant thrusts outward through the waves 

Her arm of yellow sand, 
And breaks the roaring surge that braves 

The gauntlet on her hand ; 

With eddying whirl the waters lock 

Yon treeless mound forlorn, 
The sharp-winged sea-fowl's breeding-rock, 

That fronts the Spouting Horn ; 

Then free the white-sailed shallops glide, 

And wide the ocean smiles, 
Till, shoreward bent, his streams divide 

The two bare Misery Isles. Ai nes. 



August i. 

O Nature ! bare thy loving breast, 
And give thy child one hour of rest, — 
One little hour to lie unseen 
Beneath thy scarf of leafy green ! 

So, curtained by a singing pine, 

Its murmuring voice shall blend with mine, 

Till lost in dreams, my faltering lay 

In sweeter music dies away. 

Midsummer. 

Warren, whose arm the doughtiest warriors fear, 
Asks of the startled crowd to lend its ear, — 
Proud of his calling, him the world loves best, 
Not as the coming, but the parting guest 

Poem for the Harvakd Anniversary. 



August 2. 

Poets, like youngest children, never grow 
Out of their mother's fondness. Nature so 
Holds their soft hands, and will not let them go, 

Till at the last they track with even feet 
Her rhythmic footsteps, and their pulses beat 
Twinned with her pulses, and their lips repeat 

The secrets she has told them, as their own ; 
Thus is the inmost soul of Nature known. 
And the rapt minstrel shares her awful throne ! 
Bryant's Sf.ventieth Birthday 



August 3. 

I once went to a church in London and heard 
the famous Edward Irving preach, and heard some 
of his congregation speak in the strange words 
characteristic of their miraculous gift of tongues. 
I had a respect for the logical basis of this singular 
phenomenon. I have always thought it was natu- 
ral that any celestial message should demand a 
language of its own, only to be understood by 
divine illumination. All human words tend, of 
course, to stop short in human meaning. 

The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 



August 4. 

One broad, white sail in Spezzia's treacherous 
bay ; 

On comes the blast ; too daring bark, beware ! 
The cloud has clasped her ; lo ! it melts away ; 

The wide, waste waters, but no sail is there. . . . 

But Love still prayed, with agonizing wail, 

" One, one last look, ye heaving waters, yield ! " 

Till Ocean, clashing in his jointed mail, » 
Raised the pale burden on his level shield. 

Slow from the shore the sullen waves retire ; 

His form a nobler element shall claim ; 
Nature baptized him in ethereal fire, 

And Death shall crown him with a wreath of 
flame. After a Lecture on Shelley. 



August 5. 

A poet sails without visible landmarks to unex- 
plored regions of truth, which philosophy has yet 
to lay down on its atlas. The philosopher gets his 
track by observation ; the poet trusts to his inner 
sense, and makes the straighter and swifter line. 
The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 



August 6. 

The year 1809, which introduced me to atmos- 
pheric existence, was the birtb-year of Tennyson, 
Gladstone, Lord Houghton, and Darwin. It 
seems like an honor to have come into the world 
in such company, but it is more likely to promote 
humility than vanity in a common mortal to find 
himself coeval with such illustrious personages. 
Men born in the same year watch each other, es- 
pecially as the sands of life begin to run low. 

Our Hundred Days in Europe. 

I saw the poet to the best advantage, under his 
own tree^ and walking over his own domain. . . . 
In this garden of England, the Isle of Wight, 
where everything grows with such a lavish extrav- 
agance of greenness that it seems as if it must 
bankrupt the soil before autumn, I felt as if weary 
eyes and overtasked brains might reach their hap- 
piest haven of rest. 

Our Hundred Days in Europe. 



August 7. 

" Self-made " is imperfectly made, or education 
is a superfluity and a failure. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 

All vanished ! It were idle to complain 

That ere the fruits shall come the flowers must 
fall; 
Yet somewhat we have lost amidst our gain, 
Some rare ideals time may not restore, 
The charm of courtly breeding, seen no more. 
And reverence, dearest ornament of all. 

King's Chapel. 



August 8. 

O'ershadowed by the walls that climb, 

Piled up in air by living hands, 
A rock amid the waves of time, 

Our gray old house of worship stands. 

High o'er the pillared aisles we love 
The symbols of the past look down; 

Unharmed, unharming, throned above, 
Behold the mitre and the crown ! 

Let not our younger faith forget 

The loyal souls that held them dear; 

The prayers we read their tears have wet, 
The hymns we sing they loved to hear. 

Hymn for King's Chapel Anniversary. 



August 9. 

Nor let the rhymester of the hour deride 

The straight-backed measure with its stately stride ; 

It gave the mighty voice of Dryden scope ; 

It sheathed the steel-bright epigrams of Pope ; 

In Goldsmith's verse it learned a sweeter strain ; 

Byron and Campbell wore its clanking chain ; 

I smile to listen while the critic's scorn 

Flouts the proud purple kings have nobly worn ; 

Bid eack new rhymer try his dainty skill 

And mould his frozen phrases as he will ; 

We thank the artist for his neat aevice ; 

The shape is pleasing, though the stuff is ice. 

Before the New York Academy of Medicine. 



August 10. 

The opinions of relatives as to a man's powers 
are very commonly of little value ; not merely be- 
cause they sometimes overrate their own flesh and 
blood, as some may suppose ; on the contrary, they 
are quite as likely to underrate those whom they 
have grown into the habit of considering like 
themselves. 

The advent of genius is like what florists style 
the breaking of a seedling tulip into what we may 
call high-caste colors, — ten thousand dingy flow- 
ers, then one with the divine streak. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



August n. 

His acuteness and accuracy of observation were 
so great that an oversight or an error was not 
likely to be detected in any of his work by any 
other than himself. His mental eye was not only, 
as we should say of a good microscope, at once 
remarkable for penetration and definition, but it 
was as nearly achromatic as we can hope to find 
any human organ of intellectual vision. His word 
was as trustworthy as a plumb-line or a spirit- 
level. . . . 

Jeffries Wyman would have been more famous 
if he had been less modest. He did a man's work 
with a woman's patience, meekness, fidelity, and 
noiseless efficiency. . . . Who has ever preached 
such a sermon as this sweet and lovely life has 
been, always setting forth in the golden letters of 
daily actions .'' Professor Jeffries Wvman. 



August 12. 

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind 
overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to 
break its own wheels and levers, if anything is 
thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop 
them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does 
not accumulate force enough to hurt itself ; stu- 
pidity often saves a man from going mad. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 



August 13. 

The green-haired maize her silken tresses laid, 
In soft luxuriance, on her harsh brocade ; 
The gourd that swells beneath her tossing plume : 
The coarser wheat that rolls in lakes of bloom, — 
Its coral stems and milk-white flowers alive 
With the wide murmurs of the scattered hive. 

Dedicatory Poem. 
Our children know each wildwood smell, 

The bayberry and the fern, 
The man who does not know them well 
Is all too old to learn. 

After a Lecture on Wordsworth. 



August 14. 

I don't like to say it, but poets commonly have 
no larger stock of tunes than hand-organs ; and 
when you hear them piping up under your window 
you know pretty well what to expect. The more 
stops, the better. Do let them all be pulled out in 
their turn ! 

So spoke my friend, the Poet, and read me one 
of his stateliest songs, and after it a gay chanson, 
and then a string of epigrams. All true, — he said, 
— all flowers of his soul ; only one with the corolla 
spread, and another with its disk half opened, and 
the third with the heart-leaves covered up and only 
a petal or two showing its tip through the calyx. 
The water-lily is the type of the poet's soul. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



August 15. 

Two things, at least, Napoleon accomplished: 
he opened the way for ability of all kinds, and he 
dealt the death-blow to the divine right of kings 
and all the abuses which clung to that superstition. 
If I brought nothing else away from my visit to his 
mausoleum, I left it impressed with what a man 
can be when fully equipped by nature, and placed 
in circumstances where his forces can have full 
play. " How infinite in faculty ! ... in appre- 
hension how like a god ! " Such were my reflec- 
tions ; very much, I suppose, like those of the aver- 
age visitor, and too obviously having nothing to 
require contradiction or comment. 

Our Hundred Days in Europe. 



August 16. 

Scotland. The whole country full of the ro- 
mance of history and poetry. Most to be remem- 
bered the incomparable loveliness of Edinburgh. 
I was fascinated by the singular beauties of that 
" romantic town," which Scott called his own, and 
which holds his memory as a most precious part 
of its inheritance. The castle with the precipi- 
tous rocky wall out of which it grows, the deep 
ravines with their bridges, pleasant Calton Hill 
and memorable Holyrood Palace, the new town 
and the old town with their strange contrasts, and 
Arthur's Seat overlooking all. 

Our Hundred Days in Europe. 



August 17. 

Whose smile is that ? Its pattern Nature gave, 
A sunbeam dancing in a dimpled wave ; 
KiRKLAND alone such grace from Heaven could 

win, 
His features radiant as the soul within ; 
That smile would let him through Saint Peter's 

gate 
While sad-eyed martyrs had to stand and wait. 
Vestigia Quinqub Retrorsum. 



August 18. 

A little woolly knob, which lookea and saw 
with wonder the strawberry reddening, and per- 
ceived the fragrance it diffused all around, begins 
to fill out, and grow soft and pulpy and sweet ; 
and at last a glow comes to its cheek, and we say 
the peach is ripening. When Nature has done 
with it, and delivers it to us in its perfection, we 
forget all the lesser fruits which have gone before 
it. If the flavor of the peach and the fragrance of 
the rose are not found in some fruit and flower 
which grow by the side of the river of life, an 
earth-born spirit might be forgiven for missing 
them. The strawberry and pink are very delight- 
ful, but we could be happy without them. 

Our Hundred Days in Europe. 



August 19. 

Flamsteed and Newton look with brows unclouded, 
Their strife forgotten with its faded scars, — 

Titans who found the world of space too crowded 
To walk in peace among its myriad stars. 

A Welcome to Benjamin Apthorp Gould. 

The glittering lyric bounds elastic by, 
With flashing ringlets and exulting eye, 
While every image, in her airy whirl, 
Gleams like a diamond ori a dancing girl ! 

Poetry. 

August 20, 

I come under your windows, some fine morning, 
and play you one of my adagio movements, and 
some of you say, — This is good, — play us so al- 
ways. But, dear friends, if I did not change the 
stop sometimes, the machine would wear out in 
one part and rust in another. How easily this or 
that tune flows ! — you say, — there must be no end 
of just such melodies in him. — I will open the poor 
machine for you one moment, and you shall look. 

Ah ! Every note marks where a spur of steel 

has been driven in. It is easy to grind out the 
song, but to plant these bristling points which 
make it was the painful task of time. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Tablb. 



August 21. 

Nor think that Nature saves her bloom 

And slights our grassy plain ; 
For us she wears her court costume, — 

Look on its broidered train ; 
The lily with the sprinkled dots, 

Brands of the noontide beam ; 
The cardinal, and the blood-red spots, 

Its double in the stream. 
As if some wounded eagle's breast, 

Slow throbbing o'er the plain, 
Had left its airy path impressed 

In drops of scarlet rain. 

After a Lecture on Wordsworth. 



August 22. 
I shall speak of trees as we see them, love them, 
adore them in the fields, where they are alive, hold- 
ing their green sun-shades over our heads, talking 
to us with their hundred thousand whispering 
tongues, looking down on us with that sweet meek- 
ness which belongs to huge, but limited organisms, 
— which one sees in the brown eyes of oxen, but 
most in the patient posture, the outstretched arms, 
and the heavy-drooping ropes of these vast beings 
endowed with life, but not with soul, — which out- 
grow us and outlive us, but stand helpless, — poor 
things ! — while Nature dresses and undresses 
them, like so many full -sized, but underwitted 
children. The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



August 23. 

These United States furnish the greatest market 
for iwX.^WtzX.xx'A green fricit oi all the places in the 
world. I think so, at any rate. The demand for 
intellectual labor is so enormous and the market 
so far from nice, that young talent is apt to fare like 
unripe gooseberries, — get plucked to make a fool 
of. . . . How can one let his fruit hang in the sun 
until it gets fully ripe, while there are so many 
hungry mouths ready to swallow it and proclaim 
its praises } Consequently, there never was such 
a collection of crude pippins and half-grown wind- 
falls as our native literature displays among its 
fruits. There are literary green-groceries at every 
corner, which will buy anything, from a button- 
pear to a pine-apple. It takes a long apprentice- 
ship to train a whole people to reading and writing. 
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



August 24. 

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into 
another mind than in the one where they sprang 
up. That which was a weed in one intelligence 
becomes a flower in the other, and a flower, again, 
dwindles down to a mere weed by the same change. 
Healthy growths may become poisonous by falling 
upon the wrong mental soil, and what seemed a 
night-shade in one mind unfold as a morning-glory 
in the other. The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 



August 25. 

Nobody knows New England who is not on 
terms of intimacy with one of its elms. The elm 
comes nearer to having a soul than any other vege- 
table creature among us. Elsie Venner. 

When the broad elm, sole empress of the plain, 
Whose circling shadow speaks a century's reign 
Wreathes in the clouds her regal diadem, — 
A forest waving on a single stem. Poetry. 



August 26. 

There is a mother-idea in each particular kind of 
tree, which, if well marked, is probably embodied 
in the poetry of every language. Take the oak, 
for instance, and we find it always standing as a 
type of strength and endurance. I wonder if you 
ever thought of the single mark of supremacy 
which distinguishes this tree from all our other 
forest-trees.'' All the rest of them shirk the work 
of resisting gravity ; the oak alone defies it. It 
chooses the horizontal direction for its limbs, so 
that their whole weight may tell, — and then 
stretches them out fifty or sixty feet, so that the 
strain may be mighty enough to be worth resisting. 
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



August 27. 

I have lived by the sea-shore and by the moun- 
tams. — No, I am not going to say which is best. 
The one where your place is is the best for you. 
But this difference there is : you can domesticate 
mountains, but the sea is ferse naturae. . . . 

The mountains give their lost children berries 
and water ; the sea mocks their thirst and lets them 
die. The mountains have a grand, stupid, lovable 
tranquillity ; the sea has a fascinating, treacherous 
intelligence. The mountains dwarf mankind and 
foreshorten the procession of its long generations. 
The sea drowns out humanity and time ; it has no 
sympathy with either; for it belongs to eternity, 
and of that it sings its monotonous song for ever 
and ever. The Autocrat of the BRteAKFAST-TABLE. 



August 28. 

Some books are edifices to stand as they are 
built ; some are hewn stones ready to form a part 
of future edifices ; some are quarries from which 
stones are to be split for shaping and after use. 
Crime and Automatism. 

The works of other men live, but their personal- 
ity dies out of their labors ; the poet, who repro- 
duces himself in his creation, as no other artist 
does or can, goes down to posterity with all his 
personality blended with whatever is imperishable 
in his song. The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 



August 29. 

His is not the playwright's page ; 
His table does not ape the stage ; 
What matter if the figures seen 
Are only shadows on a screen, 
He finds in them his lurking thought, 
And on their lips the words he sought, 
Like one who sits before the keys 
And plays a tune himself to please. 

Epilogue to the Breakfast-Taele Series. 
Here are varied strains that sing 
All the changes life can bring, 
Songs when joyous friends have met, 
Songs the mourner's tears have wet. . . . 
Year by year, like milestones placed, 
Mark the record Friendship traced. 
Prisoned in the walls of time 
Life has notched itself in rhyme. 



Programme. 



August 30. 

It is a rare privilege in our nomadic state to find 
the home of one's childhood and its immediate 
neighborhood unchanged. Many born poets, I am 
afraid, flower poorly in song, or not at all, because 
they have been too often transplanted. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 
All else of earth may perish ; love alone 
Not heaven shall find outgrown ! 

H. C. m", H S., J. K. W. 



August 31. 

In the last week of August used to fall Com- 
mencement day at Cambridge. Commencement 
was a great occasion all through my boyhood. It 
has died away into next to nothing, in virtue of 
the growth of the republican principle. Its obser- 
vances emanated from the higher authorities of 
the College. " Class Day," which has killed it, is 
a triumph of universal suffrage over divine right. 

But what a time it was for us young Cantabrigi- 
ans, born under the shadow of the College walls ! 
. . . The year had nothing for us boys like " the 
tents." Tuesday night was to us like the evening 
before Agincourt. The sun crawled slowly up the 
sky, like a golden tortoise, — how long a day was 
then ! At last the blare of a trumpet ! The 
Governor was coming, guarded by his terrible 
light-horse troop. . . . 

Let those who will go into the old yellow meet- 
ing-house to hear the " parts " spoken ; for us 
rather the gay festivities of the booths and the 
stands, where the sovereigns are enjoying their 
royal feast, as they have done since the time when 
they used to be ferried over the river and come 
round by Charlestown. . . . 

Thus the summer used to die out in a blaze of 
glory, for us, the boys of Cambridge. 

The Seasons. 



^cjtnnbct* 



Scarce could the parting ocean close, 

Seamed by the Mayflower's cleaving bow, 

When o'er the rugged desert rose 

The waves that tracked the Pilgrim's plough. 

Then sprang from many a rock-strewn field 
The rippling grass, the nodding grain, 

Such growths as English meadows yield 
To scanty sun and frequent rain. 

But when the fiery days were done, 
And Autumn brought his purple haze. 

Then, kindling in the slanted sun, 

The hillsides gleamed with golden maize. . .. . 

See how the softening Mother's breast 
Warms to her children's patient wiles, — 

Her lips by loving Labor pressed 

Break in a thousand dimpling smiles. 

From when the flushing bud of June 

Dawns with its first auroral hue. 
Till shines the rounded harvest-moon, 

And velvet dahlias drink the dew. 

The New Eden. 



September i. 

The year is getting to feel rich, for his golden 
fruits are ripening fast, and he has a large balance 
in the barns, which are his banks. The members 
of his family have found out that he is well to do 
in the world. September is dressing herself in 
showy dahlias and splendid marigolds and starry 
zinnias. The Seasons. 



September 2. 

And far o'er many a distant zone 

These wrecks of Eden still are flung : 

The fruits that Paradise hath known 
Are still in earthly gardens hung. 

Yes, by our own unstoried stream 
The pink- white apple-blossoms burst 

That saw the young Euphrates gleam, — 
That Gihon's circling waters nursed. 

For us the ambrosial pear displays 
The wealth its arching branches hold, 

Bathed by a hundred summery days 
In floods of mingling fire and gold. 

And here, where beauty's cheek of flame 
With morning's earliest beam is fed. 

The sunset-painted peach may claim 
To rival its celestial red. 

The New Eden. 



September 3. 

Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is 
glorious ; but a weak flavor of genius in an essen- 
tially common person is detestable. It spoils the 
grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as 
the rinsings of an unwashed wine glass spoil a 
draught of fair water. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



September 4. 

And nearer, nearer still, the tide 

Of music seems to come, 
There 's something like a human voice, 

And something like a drum ; 
You sit in speechless agony, 

Until your ear is dumb. 

You think they are crusaders, sent 

From some infernal clime, 
To pluck the eyes of Sentiment, 

And dock the tail of Rhyme, 
To crack the voice of Melody, 

And break the legs of Time. 

But hark ! the air again is still, 

The music all is ground. 
And silence, like a poultice, comes 

To heal the blows of sound ; 
It cannot be, — it is, — it is, — 

A hat is going round ! 

The Music-Grinders. 



September 5. 

I never heard but two voices in my life that 
frightened me by their sweetness. 

Frightened you? — Yes, frightened me. 

They made me feel as if there might be constituted 
a creature with such a chord in her voice to some 
string in another's soul, that if she but spoke, he 
would leave all and follow her, though it were into 
the jaws of Erebus. Our only chance to keep our 
wits is, that there are so few natural chords between 
others' voices and this string in our souls, and that 
those which at first may have jarred a little by and 
by come into harmony with it. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Tablb. 



September 6. 

Language is a solemn thing, it grows out of life, 
— out of its agonies and ecstasies, its wants and 
its weariness. Every language is a temple, in 
which the soul of those who speak it is enshrined. 
Because time softens its outlines and rounds the 
sharp angles of its cornices, shall a fellow take 
a pickaxe to help time ? . . . 

After all, it is likely that the language will shape 
itself by larger forces than phonography and dic- 
tionary-making. You may spade up the ocean as 
much as you like and harrow it afterwards, if you 
can, — but the moon will still lead the tides, and 
the winds will form their surface. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 



September 7. 

Every human soul leaves its port with sealed or- 
ders. These may be opened earHer or later on its 
voyage, but until they are opened no one can tell 
what is to be his course or to what harbor he is 
bound, Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

Every event that a man would master must be 
mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the 
reins of a thought except as it galloped by him. 
The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 

September 8. 

Twice had the mellowing sun of autumn crowned 
The hundredth circle of his yearly round, 
When, as we meet to-day, our fathers met : 
That joyous gathering who can e'er forget. . . . 

Two voices, only two, to earth belong. 
Of all whose accents met the listening throng : 
Winthrop, alike for speech and guidance framed, 
On that proud day a twofold duty claimed : 
One other yet, — remembered or forgot, — 
Forgive my silence if I name him not. 
Can I believe it .'' I, whose youthful voice 
Claimed a brief gamut, — notes not over-choice, — 
Stood undismayed before the solemn throng, 
And Propria voce sung that saucy song 
"Which even in memory turns my soul aghast, — 
Felix audacia was the verdict cast. 

Poem for the Harvard Anniversary. 



September 9. 

What dreams we 've had of deathless name, as 

scholars, statesmen, bards, 
While Fame, the lady with the trump, held up her 

picture cards ! 
Till, having nearly played our game, she gayly 

whispered, " Ah ! 
I said you should be something grand, — you '11 

soon be grandpapa." 

Meeting of the Ai.umni. 



September 10. 

Little localized powers, and little narrow streaks 
of specialized knowledge, are things men are very 
apt to be conceited about. Nature is very wise ; 
but for this encouraging principle how many small 
talents and little accomplishments would be ne- 
glected ! 

Talk about conceit as much as you like, it is to 
human character what salt is to the ocean ; it keeps 
it sweet, and renders it endurable. Say rather it 
is like the natural unguent of the sea-fowl's plum- 
age which enables him to shed the rain that falls 
on him and the wave in which he dips. When one 
has had all his conceit taken out of him, when he 
has lost all his illusions, his feathers will soon soak 
through, and he will fly no more. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



September ii. 

Hardly any one perfectly understands a poem 
but the poet himself. One naturally loves his own 
poem as no one else can. It fits the mental mould 
in which it was cast, and it will not exactly fit any 
other. For this reason I had rather listen to a 
poet reading his own verses than hear the best elo- 
cutionist that ever spouted recite them. He may 
not have a good voice or enunciation, but he puts 
his heart and his interpenetrative intelligence into 
every line, word, and syllable. 

Our Hundred Days in Europe. 



September 12. 

From the poet's lips 
His verse sounds doubly sweet, for none like him 
Feels every cadence of its wave-like flow ; 
He lives the passion over, while he reads. 
That shook him as he sang his lofty strain. 
And pours his life through each resounding line, 
As ocean, when the stormy winds are hushed. 
Still rolls and thunders thi'ough his billowy caves. 
Wind-Clouds and Star-Drifts. 

Ah, brothers ! dear brothers ! the harp that I hold 
No craftsman could string and no artisan mould ; 
He shaped it, He strung it, who fashioned the 

lyres 
That ring with the hymns of the seraphim choirs. 

My Annual. 



September 13. 

We see nothing of the bees that built the honey- 
comb and stored it with its sweets, but we can 
trace the veining in the wings of insects that flitted 
through the forests which are now coal-beds, kept 
unchanging in the amber that holds them ; and so 
the passion of Sappho, the tenderness of Simon- 
ides, the purity of holy George Herbert, the lofty 
contemplativeness of James Shirley, are before us 
to-day as if they were living, in a few tears of am- 
ber verse. It seems, when one reads, 

" The glories of our birth and state," 
as if it were not a very difficult matter to gain im- 
mortality, — such an immortality at least as a per- 
ishable language can give. A single lyric is enough 
if one can only find in his soul and finish in his in- 
tellect one of those jewels fit to sparkle " on the 
stretched forefinger of all time." The Poet. 



September 14. 

This, too, a conqueror ! His the vast domain, 
Wider than widest sceptre-shadowed lands ; 

Earth, and the weltering kingdom of the main 
Laid their broad charters in his royal hands. 

His was no taper lit in cloistered cage, 

Its glimmer borrowed from the grove or porch ; 

He read the record of the planet's page 
By Etna's glare and Cotopaxi's torch. 

Humboldt's Birthday. 



September 15. 

I suppose that a man's mind does in time form a 
neutral salt with the elements in the universe for 
which it has special elective affinities. In fact, I 
look upon a library as a kind of mental chemist's 
shop, filled v^ith the crystals of all forms and hues 
which have come from the union of individual 
thought with local circumstances or universal prin- 
ciples. The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 

Every library should try to be complete on some- 
thing, if it were only on the history of pin-heads. I 
don't mean that I buy all the trashy compilations 
on my special subjects, but I try to have all the 
works of any real importance relating to them, old 
as well as new. 

The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 



September 16. 

On those dark shelves no housewife hand profanes, 
O'er his mute files the monarch folio reigns ; 
A mingled race, the wreck of chance and time, 
That talk all tongues and breathe of every clime, 
Each knows his place, and each may claim his part 
In some quaint corner of his master's heart. 

The Study. 
Smile at their first small ventures as we may. 
The schoolboy's copy shapes the scholar's hand. 
American Academy Centennial. 



bEPTJtMBER 17. 

Full of crooked little streets ; but I tell you Bos- 
ton has opened, and kept open, more turnpikes that 
lead straight to free thought and free speech and 
free deeds than any other city of live men or dead 
men, — I don't care how broad their streets are, 
nor how high their steeples ! 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 

" Boston State-House is the hub of the solar 
system. You could n't pry that out of a Boston 
man, if you had the tire of all creation straightened 
out for a crowbar." 

Sir, — said I, — I am gratified with your remark. 
It expresses with pleasing vivacity that which I 
have sometimes heard uttered with malignant dul- 
ness. The satire of the remark is essentially true 
of Boston, — and of all other considerable — and 
inconsiderable — places with which I have had the 
privilege of being acquainted. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



September 18. 

The conversational dogmatist on the imperial 
scale becomes every year more and more an im- 
possibility. If he is in intelligent company he 
will be almost sure to find some one who knows 
more about some of the subjects he generalizes 
upon than any wholesale thinker who handles 
knowledge by the cargo is like to know. 

The Poet at the Breakfast-Taele. 



September 19. 

Science is the topography of ignorance. From 
a few elevated points we triangulate vast spaces, 
inclosing infinite unknown details. We cast the 
lead, and draw up a little sand from abysses we 
shall never reach with our dredges. 

The best part of our knowledge is that which 
teaches us where knowledge leaves off and igno- 
rance begins. Nothing more clearly separates a 
vulgar from a superior mind, than the confusion in 
the first between the little that it truly knows, on 
the one hand, and what it half knows and what it 
thinks it knows, on the other. 

Border Lines in Medical Science. 



September 20. 

If a fellow attacked my opinions in print, would 
I reply? Not I. Do you think I don't under- 
stand what my friend, the Professor, long ago 
called the hydrostatic paradox of controversy ? 

Don't know what that means ? — Well, I will tell 
you. You know that, if you had a bent tube, one 
arm of which was of the size of a pipe-stem and 
the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would 
stand at the same height in one as in the other. 
Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the 
same way, — and the fools know it. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



September 21. 

Here glowed the apple with the pencilled streak 
Of morning painted on its southern cheek ; 
The pear's long necklace strung with golden drops. 
Arched like the banian, o'er its pillared props. 

Dedicatokv Poem. 

Dear though the shadowy maple be, 
And dearer still the whispering pine, 

Dearest yon russet-laden tree 

Browned by the heavy rubbing kine ! 

There childhood flung its rustling stone, 

There venturous boyhood learned to climb,— 
How well the early graft was known 
Whose fruit was ripe ere harvest-time ! 

The New Eden. 
»— — 

September 22. 

No man could leave a sweeter memory than the 
author of " Rab and his Friends," and " Pet Mar- 
jorie." ... I thought how much it would have added 
to the enjoyment of my visit if I could have taken 
his warm hand and listened to his friendly voice. 
I brought home with me a precious little manu- 
script, written expressly for me by one who had 
known Dr. John Brown from the days of her girl- 
hood, in which his character appears in the sr.me 
lovable and loving light as that which shines in 
every page he himself has written. 

Our Hundred Days in Europe. 



September 23. 
Any new formula which suddenly emerges in 
our consciousness has its roots in long trains of 
thought ; it is virtually old when it makes its ap- 
pearance among the recognized growths of our in- 
tellect. Any crystalline group of musical words 
has had a long and still period to form in. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Tabi-h. 



September 24. 

In vain the delving antiquary tries 
To find the tomb where generous Harvard lies : 
Here, here, his lasting monument is found, 
Where every spot is consecrated ground ! 

Poem for the Harvard Anniversary. 
Lift up your eyes ! behold these pictured walls ; 
Look where the flood of western glory falls 
Through the great sunflower disk of blazing panes 
Li ruby, saffron, azure, emerald stains ; 
With reverent step the marble pavement tread 
Where our proud Mother's martyr-roll is read ; 
See the great halls that cluster, gathering round 
This lofty shrine with holiest memories 

crowned ; . . . 
Read on her standard, always in the van, 
" Truth," — the one word that makes a slave a man ; 
Think whose the hands that fed her altar-fires, 
Then count the debt we owe our scholar-sires. 

Vestigia Quinque Retrorsum. 



September 25. 

T don't think there are many poets in the sense 
of creators ; but of those sensitive natures which 
reflect themselves naturally in soft and melodious 
words, pleading for sympathy with their joys and 
sorrows, every literature is full. Nature carves 
with her own hands the brain which holds the cre- 
ative imagination, but she casts the over-sensitive 
creatures in scores from the same mould. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 

How many women are born too finely organized 
in sense and soul for the highway they must walk 
with feet unshod. Life is adjusted to the wants of 
the stronger sex. There are plenty of torrents to 
be crossed in its journey ; but their stepping-stones 
are measured by the stride of man, and not of 
woman. The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 



September 26. 

Nay, grieve not for the dead alone 

Whose song has told their heart's sad story, - 
Weep for the voiceless, who have known 

The cross without the crown of glory ! 
Not where Leucadian breezes sweep 

O'er Sappho's memory-haunted billow, 
But where the glistening night-dews weep 

On nameless sorrow's churchyard pillow. 

The Voiceless. 



September 27. 

Thine was unetinted zeal, unchilled devotion, 
While the blue realm had kingdoms to ex- 
plore, — 
Patience, like his who ploughed the unfurrowed 
ocean, 
Till o'er its margin loomed San Salvador. 

Through the long nights I see thee ever waking, 
Thy footstool earth, thy roof the hemisphere, 

While with thy griefs our weaker hearts are aching. 
Firm as thine equatorial's rock-based pier. 

To Benjamin Apthorp Gould. 

• 

September 28. 

What is this life without the poor accidents 
which made it our own, and by which we identify 
ourselves ? Ah me ! I might like to be a winged 
chorister^but still it seems to me I should hardly 
be quite happy if I could not recall at will the Old 
House with the Long Entry, and the White Cham- 
ber (where I wrote the first verses that made me 
known, with a pencil, slans pede in tmo, pretty 
nearly) and the Little Parlor, and the Study, and 
the old books in uniforms as varied as those of 
the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, 
and the front yard with the stars of Bethlehem 
growing, flowerless, among the grass, and the dear 
faces to be seen no more there or anywhere on this 
earthly place of farewells. The Poet. 



September 29. 

Our ancient church ! its lowly tower 

Beneath the loftier spire, 
Is shadowed when the sunset hour 

Clothes the tall shaft in fire ; 
It sinks beyond the distant eye, 

Long ere the glittering vane, 
High wheeling in the western sky, 

Has faded o'er the plain. 

Like Sentinel and Nun, they keep 

Their vigil on the green ; 
One seems to guard, and one to weep. 

The dead that lie between ; 
And both roll out, so full and near, 

Their music's mingling waves, 
They shake the grass whose pennoned spear 

Leans on the narrow graves. 

The Cambridge Churchyard. 



September 30. 
Between two breaths what crowded mysteries 

lie,— 
The first short gasp, the last and long drawn sigh ! 
Like phantoms painted on the magic slide, 
Forth from the darkness of the past we glide, 
As living shadows for a moment seen 
In airy pageant on the eternal screen, 
Traced by a ray from one unchanging flame. 
Then seek the dust and stillness whence we came. 
A Rhymed Lesson. 



aDctober. 



No more the summer floweret charms, 

The leaves will soon be sere, 
And Autumn folds his jewelled arms 

Around the dying year ; 
So, ere the waning seasons claim 

Our leafless groves awhile, 
"With golden wine and glowing flame 

We '11 crown our lonely isle. 

No bars of steel, or walls of stone, 

Our little empire bound, 
But, circling with his azure zone, 

The sea runs foaming round ; 
The whitening wave, the purpled skies, 

The blue and lifted shore, 
Braid with their dim and blending dyes 

Our wide horizon o'er. 

Once more the merry voices sound 

Within the antlered hall, 
And long and loud the baying hounds 

Return the hunter's call ; 
And through the woods, and o'er the hill, 

And far along the bay, 
The driver's horn is sounding shrill, — 

Up, sportsmen, and away ! 

The Island Hunting-Song 



OCTOBER I. 

October, the extravagant sister, has ordered an 
immense amount of the most gorgeous forest tapes- 
try for her grand reception. . . . Two autumnal 
wonders have been much written about, and never 
yet reached, — the change of the forest leaves and 

the Indian summer. The Seasons. 

— « — 

October 2. 

Some of the smaller cities are charming. If 
they have an old church or two, a few stately man- 
sions of former grandees, here and there an old 
dwelling with the second story projecting, — if 
they have, scattered about, those mighty square 
houses built something more than half a century 
ago, — if they have gardens with elbowed apple- 
trees, — if they have a little grass in the side- 
streets, enough to betoken quiet without proclaim- 
ing decay, — I think I could go to pieces, after my 
life's work were done, in one of those tranquil 
places as sweetly as in any cradle that an old man 
may be rocked to sleep in. 

Rapidly growing towns are most unfavorable to 
the imaginative and reflective faculties. Let a 
man live in one of these old quiet places, — and 
the wine of his soul, which is kept thick and tur- 
bid by the rattle of busy streets, settles, and, as you 
hold it up, you may see the sun through it by day 
and the stars by night. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



October 3. 

Thoughtful in youth, but not austere in age ; 
Calm, but not cold and cheerful though a sage ; 
Too true to flatter, and too kind to sneer, 
And only just when seemingly severe ; 
So gently blending courtesy and art, 
That wisdom's lips seemed borrowing friendship' 

heart ; 
Taught by the sorrows that his age had known 
In others' trials to forget his own, 
As hour by hour his lengthened day declined, 
A sweeter radiance lingered o'er his mind. 
Cold were the lips that spoke his early praise. 
And hushed the voices of his morning days, 
Yet the same accents dwelt on every tongue, 
And love renewing kept him ever young. 

A Portrait. 
( Dr. James Jackson. ) 



October 4. 

Don't let your heart grow cold, and you may 
carry cheerfulness and love with you into the teens 
of your second century, if you can last so long. 
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 

Fame usually comes to those who are thinking 
about something else, — very rarely to those who 
say to themselves, " Go to, now, let us be a cele- 
brated individual ! " 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Tablb. 



October 5. 

A man who seems to have been anointed from 
his birth ; who lived a life pure, laborious, self- 
denying, occupied with the highest themes, and 
busy in the highest kind of labor, — such a life as 
in another church might have given him a place 
in the " Acta Sanctorum." We can in part account 
for what he was when we remember his natural 
inherited instincts, his training, and his faith. His 
ancestors had fed on sermons so long that he must 
have been born with Scriptural texts lying latent in 
his embryonic thinking-marrow, like the undevel- 
oped picture in a film of collodion. 

Jonathan Edwards. 
• 

October 6. 

How vast the workroom where he brought 
The viewless implements of thought ! 
The wit how subtle, how profound. 
That Nature's tangled webs unwound; 

That through the clouded matrix saw 

The crystal planes of shaping law. 

Through these the sovereign skill that planned, — 

The Father's care, the Master's hand ! . . .. 

Farewell ! the spirit needs must rise, 
So long a tenant of the skies, — 
Rise to that home all worlds above 
Whose sun is God, whose light is love. 

Benjamin Peircb. 
October b^ r88o- 



October 7. 

Self-made men ? — Well, yes. Of course every- 
body likes and respects self-made men. It is a 
great deal better to be made in that way than not 
to be made at all. Are any of you younger people 
old enough to remember that Irishman's house on 
the marsh at Cambridgeport, which house he built 
from drain to chimney-top with his own hands ? 
. . A regular hand could certainly have built a bet- 
ter house ; but it was a very good house for a " self- 
made" carpenter's house, and people praised it, 
and said how remarkably well the Irishman had 
succeeded. They never thought of praising the 
fine blocks of houses a little farther on. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



October 8. 

You can't keep a dead level long, if you burn 
everything down flat to make it. "Why, bless your 
soul, if all the cities of the world were reduced to 
ashes, you 'd have a new set of millionnaires in a 
couple of years or so out of the trade in potash. 
In the mean time, what is the use of setting the 
man with the silver watch against the man with 
the gold watch, and the man without any watch 
against them both. 

The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 



October 9. 

Lard of all being ! throned afar, 
Thy glory flames from sun and star ; 
Centre and soul of every sphere, 
Yet to each lovmg heart how near! 

Sun of our life, thy quickening ray 
Sheds on our path the glow of day ; 
Star of our hope, thy softened light 
Cheers the long watches of the night. 

Our midnight is thy smile withdrawn ; 
Our noontide is thy gracious dawn ; 
Our rainbow arch thy mercy's sign : 
All, save the clouds of sin, are thine ! 

A Sun-Day Hymn. 

October 10. 

I am too much a lover of genius, I sometimes 
think, and too often get impatient with dull peo- 
ple, so that, in their weak talk, where nothing is 
taken for granted, I look forward to some future 
possible state of development, when a gesture pass- 
ing between a beatified human soul and an arch- 
angel shall signify as much as the complete history 
of a planet, from the time when it curdled to the 
time when its sun was burned out. And yet, when 
a strong brain is weighed with a true heart, it 
seems to me like balancing a bubble against a 
wedge of gold. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 



October ii. 

It is the time to be in the woods or on the sea- 
shore, — a sweet season that should be given to 
lonely walks, to stumbling about in old churchyards, 
plucking on the way the aromatic silvery herb ever- 
lasting, and smelling at its dry flower until it ether- 
izes the soul into aimless reveries outside of space 

and time. Thb Seasons. 

• 

October 12. 

On many a field he fought in wilds afar ; 
See on his swarthy cheek the bullet's scar ! 
There hangs a murderous tomahawk ; beneath, 
Without its blade, a knife's embroidered sheath ; 
Save for the stroke his trusty weapon dealt 
His scalp had dangled at their owner's belt ; 
But not for him such fate ; he lived to see 
The bloodier strife that made our nation free, 
To serve with willing toil, with skilful hand. 
The war-worn saviors of the bleeding land. 
His wasting life to others' needs he gave, — 
Sought rest in home and found it in the grave. 
See where the stones life's brief memorials keep, 
The tablet telling where he "fell on sleep," — 
Watched by a winged cherub's rayless eye, — 
A scroll above that says we all must die, — 
Those saddening lines beneath, the " Night 

Thoughts " lent : 
So stands the Soldier's, Surgeon's monument. 

(A Family Record.) _ Dr. David Holmes. 



October 13. 

I found that the difference between her reading 
and mine was like that of a man's and a woman's 
dusting a library. The man flaps about with a 
bunch of feathers ; the woman goes to work softly 
with a cloth. She does not raise half the dust, 
nor fill her own mouth and eyes with it, — but she 
goes into all the corners, and attends to the leaves 
as much as the covers. — Books are the negative 
pictures of thought, and the more sensitive the 
mind that receives their images, the more nicely 
the finest lines are reproduced. A woman (of the 
right kind), reading after a man, follows him as 
Ruth followed the reapers of Boaz, and her glean- 
ings are often the finest of the wheat. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 



October 14. 

You talk of the fire of genius. Many a blessed 
woman, who dies unsung and unremembered, has 
given out more of the real vital heat that keeps 
the life in human souls, without a spark flitting 
through her humble chimney to tell the world 
about it, than would set a dozen theories smoking, 
or a hundred odes simmering, in the brains of so 
many men of genius. It is in latent caloric, if I 
may borrow a philosophical expression, that many 
of the noblest hearts give out the life that warms 
them. The Professor at the Breakfast-Tablk, 



October 15. 

The measured footsteps of the Fates are dumb, 
Unseen, unheard, unheralded, they come, 
Prophet and priest and all their following fail. 
Who then is left to rend the future's veil ? 
Who but the poet, he whose nicer sense 
No film can baffle with its slight defence, 
Whose finer vision marks the waves that stray, 
Felt, but unseen, beyond the violet ray ? — 
Stays not for time his secrets to reveal, 
But reads his message ere he breaks the seal. 
So Mantua's bard foretold the coming day 
Ere Bethlehem's infant in the manger lay ; 
The promise trusted to a mortal tongue 
Found listening ears before the angels sung. 

Poem for the Harvard Anniversary. 



October 16. 
A man like Newton or Leibnitz or Haller used 
to paint a picture of outward or inward nature 
with a free hand, and stand back and look at it as 
a whole and feel like an archangel ; but nowadays 
you have a Society, and they come together and 
make a great mosaic, each man bringing his little 
bit and sticking it in its place, but so taken up 
with his petty fragment that he never thinks of 
looking at the picture the little bits make when 
they are put together. You can't get any talk out 
of these specialists away from their own subjects. 
The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 



October 17. 

How blest is he who knows no meaner strife 
Than Art's long battle with the foes of life ! 
No doubt assails him, doing still his best, 
And trusting kindly Nature for the rest. . . . 
He comes ; the languid sufferer lifts his head 
And smiles a welcome from his weary bed. . . . 
How can he feel the petty stings of grief 
Whose cheering presence always brings relief? 
What ugly dreams can trouble his repose 
Who yields himself to soothe another's woes ? 

No safeguard his ; no amulet he wears, 
Too well he knows that Nature never spares 
Her truest servant, powerless to defend 
From her own weapons her unshrinking friend. 
He dares the fate the bravest well might shun, 
Nor asks reward save only Heaven's " Well done ! " 
Centennial of the Massachusetts Medical Society. 

October 18. 

Four gospels tell their story to mankind, 
And none so full of soft, caressing words 
That bring the Maid of Bethlehem and her Babe 
Before our tear-dimmed eyes, as his who learned 
In the meek service of his gracious art 
The tones which, like the medicinal balms 
That calm the sufferer's anguish, soothe our souls. 
Wind-Clouds and Star-Drifts. 



October 19. 

No stranger can get a great many notes of tor- 
ture out of a human soul ; it takes one that knows 
it well, — parent, child, brother, sister, intimate. 
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which 
fits them all. 

The Autocrat of the Break fast-Tablb. 



October 20. 

Little I ask ; my wants are few ; 

I only wish a hut of stone, 
(A very plain brown stone will do) 

That I mav call my own ; — 
And close at hand is such a one, 
In yonder street that fronts the sun. 

Plain food is quite enough for me ; 

Three courses are as good as ten ; — 
If Nature can subsist on three, 

Thank Heaven for three. Amen ! 
I always thought cold victual nice ; — 
My choice would be vanilla-ice. 

I care not much for gold or land ; — 

Give me a mortgage here and there, — 
Some good bank-stock, some note of hand, 

Or trifling railroad share, — 
I only ask that Fortune send 
A little more than I shall spend. 

Contentment. 



October 21. 

No Alpine needle, with its climbing spire, 
Brings down for mortals the Promethean fire, 
If careless nature have forgot to frame 
An altar worthy of the sacred flame. 
Unblest by any save the goatherd's lines, 
Mont Blanc rose soaring through his "sea of 

pines ; " 
In vain the rivers from their ice-caves flash ; 
No hymn salutes them but the Ranz des Vaches, 
Till lazy Coleridge, by the morning's light. 
Gazed for a moment on the fields of white. 
And lo, the glaciers found at length a tongue, 
Mont Blanc was vocal, and Chamouni sung ! 

A Rhymed Lesson. 

And there's a nice youngster of excellent pith, — 
Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith ; 
But he shouted a song for the brave and the 

free, — 
Just read on his metal, " My country," " of thee I " 

The Boys. 



October 22. 

The real forest is hardly still except in the In- 
dian summer; then there is death in the house, 
and they are waiting for the sharp shrunken 
months to come with white raiment for the sum- 
mer's burial. Elsie Venner. 



October 23. 
Perhaps the herb everlasting, the fragrant im- 
mortelle of our autumn fields, has the most sug- 
gestive odor to me of all those that set me dream- 
ing. I can hardly describe the strange thoughts 
and emotions that come to me as I inhale the 
aroma of its pale, dry, rustling flowers. A some- 
thing it has of sepulchral spicery, as if it had been 
brought from the core of some great pyramid, 
where it had lain on the breast of a mummied 
Pharaoh. Something, too, of immortality in the 
sad, faint sweetness lingering so long in its lifeless 
petals. Yet this does not tell why it fills my eyes 
with tears and carries me in blissful thought to the 
banks of asphodel that border the River of Life. 
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



October 24. 

His rest is by the storm-swept waves 

Whom life's wild tempests roughly tried, 

"Whose heart was like the streaming caves 
Of ocean, throbbing at his side. 

Death's cold white hand is like the snow 

Laid softly on the furrowed hill, 
It hides the broken seams below. 
And leaves the summit brighter still. 

Daniel Webster. 
October 24, 1832. 



October 25. 

Marbles forget their message to mankind : 

In his own verse the poet still we find, 

In his own page his memory lives enshrined, 

As in their amber sweets the smothered bees, — 
As the fair cedar, fallen before the breeze, 
Lies self-embalmed amidst the mouldering trees. 
Bryant's Seventieth Birthday. 



October 26. 

There are two kinds of poets, just as there are 
two kinds of blondes. There are blondes who are 
such simply by deficiency of coloring matter, — 
negative or washed blondes. 

There are others that are shot through with 
golden light, with tawny or fulvous tinges in various 
degree, — positive or stained blondes, dipped in yel- 
low sunbeams, and as unlike in their mode of be- 
ing to the others as an orange is unlike a snow- 
ball. 

Just so we have the great sun-kindled, construc- 
tive imaginations, and a far more numerous class 
of poets who have a certain kind of moonlight- 
genius given them to compensate for their imper- 
fection of nature. Their want of mental coloring 
matter makes them sensitive to those impressions 
which stronger minds neglect or never feel at all. 
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



October 27. 

Faith always implies the disbelief of a lesser 
fact in favor of a greater. A little mind often 
sees the mibelief, without seeing the belief, of a 
large one. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table, 

How many of our most cherished beliefs are 

like those drinking-glasses of the ancient pattern, 

that serve us well so long as we keep them in our 

hand, but spill all if we attempt to set them down I 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



October 28. 

The portrait of Erasmus by Hans Holbein is 
one of those pictures which help to make the Old 
World worth a voyage across the Atlantic. Por- 
traits of Erasmus are not uncommon ; every 
scholar would know him if he met him in the 
other world with the look he wore on earth. . . . 
What a face it is which Holbein has handed down 
to us ! How dry it is with scholastic labor, how 
keen with shrewd scepticism, how worldly-wise,' 
how conscious of its owner's wide-awake sagacity ! 
Erasmus and Rabelais, — Nature used up all her 
arrows for their quivers, and had to wait a hun- 
dred years and more before she could find shafts 
enough for the outfit of Voltaire. 

Our Hundred Days in Europe. 



October 29. 

The wreath that star-crowned Shelley gave 
Is lymg on thy Roman grave, 
Yet on its turf young April sets 
Her store of slender violets ; 
Though all the gods their garlands shower, 
I too may bring one purple flower. . . . 
Meek child of earth ! thou wilt not shame 
The sweet, dead poet's holy name ; 
The God of music gave thee birth, 
Called from the crimson-spotted earth. 
Where, sobbing his young life away, 
His own fair Hyacinthus lay. 
— The hyacinth my garden gave 
Shall lie upon that Roman grave ! 

After a Lecture on Keats. 

October 30. 

There is little need of trying to paint the still, 
warm, misty, dreamy Indian summer in words; 
there are many states that have no articulate vo- 
cabulary, and are only to be reproduced by music, 
and the mood this season produces is of that nature. 
By and by, when the white man is thoroughly In- 
dianized (if he can bear the process), some native 
Haydn will perhaps turn the Indian summer into 
the'loveliest andante of the new " Creation." 

The Seasons. 



October 31. 

From the first gleam of morning to the gray 
Of peaceful evening, lo, a life unrolled I 
In woven pictures all its changes told, 

its lights, its shadows, every flitting ray 

Till the long curtain, falling, dims the day, 
Steals from the dial's disk the sunlight's gold 
And all the graven hours grow dark and cold 

Where late the glowing blaze of noontide lay. 

Ah ! the warm blood runs wild in youthful veins, — 
Let me no longer play with painted fire ; 
New songs for new-born days ! I would not tire 

The listening ears that wait for fresher strains 

In phrase new-moulded, new forged rhythmic 
chains, 
With plaintive measures from a worn-out lyre. 
Prefixed to a Volume of Poems. 
1881. • 



As through the forest, disarrayed 

By chill November, late I strayed, 

A lonely minstrel of the wood 

Was singing to the solitude : 

I loved thy music, thus I said, 

When o'er thy perch the leaves were spread ; 

Sweet was thy song, but sweeter now 

Thy carol on the leafless bough. 

Sing, little bird ! thy note shall cheer 

The sadness of the dying year. ... 
The summer's throbbing chant is done 
And mute the choral antiphon ; 
The birds have left the shivering pines 
To flit among the trellised vines. 
Or fan the air with scented plumes 
Amid the love-sick orange-blooms, 
And thou art here alone, — alone, — 

Sing, little bird ! the rest have flown. . . . 
Fast, fast the lengthening shadows creep, 
The songless fowls are half asleep. 
The air grows chill, the setting sun 
May leave thee ere thy song is done, 
The pulse that warms thy breast grow cold, 
Thy secret die with thee, untold : 
The lingering sunset still is bright, — 

Sing, little bird ! 't will soon be night. 
jg^^^ An Old- Year Song. 



November i. 

Those who have no ear for music must be very 
careful how they speak about that mysterious 
world of thrilling vibrations which are idle noises 
to them. And so the true saint can be entirely ap- 
preciated only by saintly natures. 

Jonathan Edwards. 

Here, as to the patriarch's tent, 

God's angel comes a guest ; 
He comes on Heaven's high errand sent, 

In earth's poor raiment drest. 

We see no halo round his brow 

Till love its own recalls, 
And like a leaf that quits the bough, 
The mortal vesture falls. 

A Memorial Tribute. 
• 

November 2. 
I love Nature, and human nature, its thoughts, 
affections, dreams, aspirations, delusions, — Art in 
all its forms, — virtu in all its eccentricities, — old 
stories from black-letter volumes and yellow manu- 
scripts, and new projects out of hot brains not yet 
imbedded in the snows of age. I love the gener- 
ous impulses of the reformer; but not less does 
my imagination feed itself upon the old litanies, 
so often warmed by the human breath upon which 
they were wafted to heaven that they glow through 
our frames like our own heart's blood. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Tablb. 



November 3. 

This was the first sweet singer in the cage 
Of our close-woven Hfe. A new-born age 
Claims in his vesper song its heritage. . . . 

How can we praise the verse whose music flows 
With solemn cadence and majestic close, 
Pure as the dew that filters through the rose ? 

How shall we thank him that in evil days 

He faltered never, — nor for blame, nor praise, 

Nor hire, nor party, shamed his earlier lays ? 

f Bryant's Seventieth Birthday. 



November 4. 

The highways of literature are spread over with 
the shells of dead novels, each of which has been 
swallowed at a mouthful by the public, and is done 
with. But write a volume of poems. No matter 
if they are all bad but one, if that one is very good. 
It will carry your name down to posterity like the 
ring of Thothmes, like the coin of Alexander. I 
don't suppose one would care a great deal about it 
a hundred or a thousand years after he is dead, but 
I don't feel quite sure. It seems as if, even in 
heaven, King David might remember *' The Lord 
is my Shepherd " with a certain twinge of earthly 
pleasure. But we don't know, we don't know. 

The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 



November 5. 
We who behold our autumn sun below 
The Scorpion's sign, against the Archer's bow, 
Know well what parting means of friend from 

friend ; 
After the snows no freshening dews descend, 
And what the frost has marred, the sunshine will 

not mend. To H. W. Longfellow. 



November 6. 
I should like to live long enough to see the 
course of the Tiber turned, and the bottom of the 
riTer thoroughly dredged. I wonder if they would 
find the seven-branched golden candlestick brought 
from Jerusalem by Titus, and said to have been 
dropped from the Milvian bridge. I have often 
thought of going fishing for it some year when I 
wanted a vacation, as some of my friends used to 
go to Ireland to fish for salmon. We all know how 
it looks well enough, from the figure of it on the 
Arch of Titus, but I should like to " heft " it in 
my own hand and carry it home and shine it up 
(excuse my colloquialisms), and sit down and look 
at it, and think and think and think until the 
Temple of Solomon built up its walls of hewn 
stone and its roofs of cedar around me as noise- 
lessly as when it rose, and " there was neither 
hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron heard in the 
house while it was in building." 

The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 



November 7. 
Mighty curious creatures, these house-flies! 
Talk about miracles ! Was there ever anything 
more miraculous, so far as our common observa- 
tion goes, than the coming and the going of these 
creatures ? Why did n't Job ask where the flies 
come from and where they go to ? . . . Where are 
the cradles of the young flies ? Where are the 
cemeteries of the dead ones, or do they die at all 
except when we kill them ? You think all the flies 
of the year are dead and gone, and there comes a 
warm day and all at once there is a general resur 
rection of them ; they had been taking a nap, that 
is all. The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 



November 8. 

Choose well your set ; our feeble nature seeks 
The aid of clubs, the countenance of cliques ; 
And with this object settle first of all 
Your weight of metal and your size of ball. 
Track not the steps of such as hold you cheap, 
Too mean to prize, though good enough to keep ; 
The " real, genuine, no-mistake Tom Thumbs " 
Are little people fed on great men's crumbs. 

Yet keep no followers of that hateful brood 
That basely mingles with the wholesome food 
The tumid reptile, which, the poet said. 
Doth wear a precious jewel in his head. 

A Rhymed Lesson. 



November 9. 

The Prince is of a lively temperament and a 
very cheerful aspect, — a young girl would call him 
" jolly " as well as " nice." ... It is really easier 
to feel at home with the highest people in the land 
than with the awkward commoner who was 
knighted yesterday. When " My Lord and Sir 
Paul " came into the Club which Goldsmith tells 
us of, the hilarity of the evening was instantly 
checked. The entrance of a dignitary like the pres- 
ent Prince of Wales would not have spoiled the 
fun of the evening. If there is any one accomplish- 
ment specially belonging to princes, it is that of 
making the persons they meet feel at ease. 

Our Hundred Days in Europe. 



November 10. 

He touched the eyelids of the blind, 

And lo ! the veil withdrawn, 
As o'er the midnight of the mind, 

He led the light of dawn. 

He asked not whence the fountains roll 

No traveller's foot has found. 
But m^apped the desert of the soul 

Untracked by sight or sound. 

What prayers have reached the sapphire throne, 

By silent fingers spelt, 
For him who first through depths unknown 

His doubtful pathway felt. 

A Memorial Tribute. S. G. H. 



November ii. 

Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel 
of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the 
case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel 
of the Resurrection. 

Tic-tac ! tic-tac ! go the wheels of thought ; our 
will cannot stop them ; they cannot stop them- 
selves ; sleep cannot still them ; madness only 
makes them go faster ; death alone can break into 
the case, and, seizing the ever-swinging pendulum, 
which we call the heart, silence at last the clicking 
of the terrible escapement we have carried so long 
beneath our wrinkled foreheads. 

The Autocrat of the Break fast-Tablb. 
♦ 

November 12. 

O Love Divine that stooped to share 
Our sharpest pang, our bitterest tear, 

On Thee we cast each earth-born care, 
We smile at pain while Thou art near ! 

Though long the weary way we tread. 
And sorrow crown each lingering year, 

No path we shun, no darkness dread, 

Our hearts still whispering. Thou art near ! 

On thee we fling our burdening woe, 

O Love Divine, forever dear, 
Content to suffer while we know, 

Living and dying, Thou art near ! 

Hymn of Trust. 



November 13. 

The Daguerreotype has fixed the most fleeting of 
our illusions, that which the apostle and the phi- 
losopher and the poet have alike used as the type 
of instability and unreality. The photograph has 
completed the triumph, by making a sheet of 
paper reflect images like a mirror and hold them 
as a picture. 

This triumph of human ingenuity is the most 
audacious, remote, improbable, incredible, — the 
one that would seem least likely to be regained, if 
all traces of it were lost, of all the discoveries man 
has made. It has become such an every-day mat- 
ter with us, that we forget its miraculous nature. 
The Stereoscope and the Stereograph. 
« 

November 14. 
The prophet's chariot, drawn by steeds of flame, 
For daily use our travelling millions claim ; 
The face we love a sunbeam makes our own ; 
No more the surgeon hears the sufferer's 

groan; . . . 
Still a new miracle each year supplies. 

The School-Boy. 
A new epoch in the history of human progress 
dates from the time when He who 

"Never but in uncreated light 
Dwelt from eternity " 

took a pencil of fire from the " angel standing in 
the sun," and placed it in the hands of a mortal. 
The Stereoscope and the Stereograph. 



November 15. 

Arrowheads must be brought to a sharp point 
and the guillotme-axe must have a slanting edge. 
Something intensely human, narrow, and definite 
pierces to the seat of our sensibilities more readily 
than huge occurrences and catastrophes. A nail 
will pick a lock that defies hatchet and hammer. 
" The Royal George " went down with all her crew, 
and Cowper wrote an exquisitely simple poem 
about it ; but the leaf which holds it is smooth, 
while that which bears the lines on his mother's 
portrait is blistered with tears. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



November 16. 

The Brahmin caste of New England. This is the 
harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy which 
many readers will at once acknowledge. There are 
races of scholars among us, in which aptitude for 
learning, and all these marks of it I have spoken 
of, are congenital and hereditary. Their names 
are always on some college catalogue or other. 
They break out every generation or two in some 
learned labor which calls them up after they seem 
to have died out. At last some newer name takes 
their place, it may be, — but you inquire a little 
and you find it is the blood of the Edwardses or 
theChauncys or the Ellerysorsome of the old his- 
toric scholars, disguised under the altered name of 
a female descendant. Elsie Venner. 



November 17. 

What were our life, with all its rents and seams, 
Stripped of its purple robes, our waking dreams ? 
The poet's song, the bright romancer's page. 
The tinselled shows that cheat us on the stage 
Lead all our fancies captive at their will ; 
Three years or threescore, we are children still. 
Opening of the Fifth Avenue Theatrb. 



November 18. 

What constitutes a man a gentleman? 

a. Not trying to be a gentleman. 

b. Self-respect underlying courtesy. 

c. Knowledge and observance of the fitness of 
things in social intercourse. 

Good dressing, quiet ways, low tones of voice, 
lips that can wait, and eyes that do not wander, 
— shyness of personalities, except in certain inti- 
mate communions, — to be light in hand in con- 
versation, to have ideas, but to be able to make 
talk, if necessary, without them, — to belong to 
the company you are in, and not to yourself, — to 
have nothing in your dress or furniture so fine 
that you cannot afford to spoil it and get another 
like it, yet to preserve the harmonies throughout 
your person and dwelling. I should say that this 
was a fair capital of manners to begin with. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Tablb. 



November 19. 
Sometimes in dim November's narrowing day, 
When all the season's pride has passed away, 
As mid the blackened stems and leaves we stray, 

We spy in sheltered nook or rocky cleft 
A starry disk the hurrying winds have left, 
Of all its blooming sisterhood bereft : 

Some pansy, with its wonderin-y baby eyes — 
Poor wayside nursling ! — fixed in blank surprise 
At the rough welcome of unfriendly skies ; 

Or golden daisy, — will it dare disclaim 
The lion's tooth, to wear this gentler name ? 
Or blood-red salvia, with its lips aflame : 

The storms have stripped the lily and the rose, 
Still on its cheek the flush of summer glows. 
And all its heart-leaves kindle as it blows. Ave. 
— ♦ — 
November 20. 
You know twenty men of talent, who are making 
their way in the world ; you may, perhaps, know 
one man of genius, and very likely do not want to 
knov/ any more. For a divine instinct, such as 
drives the goose southward and the poet heaven- 
ward, is a hard thing to manage, and proves too 
strong for many whom it possesses. It must have 
been a terrible thing to have a friend like Chatter- 
ton or Burns. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 



November 21. 

Talent is a very common family trait ; genius be- 
longs rather to individuals ; — just as you find one 
giant or one dwarf in a family, but rarely a whole 
brood of either. Talent is often to be envied, and 
genius very commonly to be pitied. It stands twice 
the chance of the other of dying in hospital, in jail, 
in debt, in bad repute. It is a perpetual insult to 
mediocrity ; its every word is a trespass against 
somebody's vested ideas. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Tablb. 



November 22. 

There is nothing gives glory and grandeur and 
romance and mystery to a place like the impend- 
ing presence of a high mountain. Our beautiful 
Northampton with its fair meadows and noble 
stream is lovely enough, but owes its surpassing 
attraction to those twin summits which brood 
over it like living presences, looking down into its 
streets as if they were its tutelary divinities, dress- 
ing and undressing their green shrines, robing them- 
selves in jubilant sunshine or in sorrowing clouds, 
and doing penance in the snowy shroud of winter, 
as if they had living hearts under their rocky ribs 
and changed their mood like the children of the 
soil at their feet, who grow up under their almost 
parental smiles and frowns. Elsie Venner. 



November 23. 

There are men of esprit who are excessively ex- 
hausting to some people. They are the talkers 
who have what may be C2X\q.^ jerky minds. Their 
thoughts do not run in the natural order of se- 
quence. They say bright things on all possible 
subjects, but their zigzags rack you to death. Af- 
ter a jolting half-hour with one of these jerky com- 
panions, talking with a dull friend affords great 
relief. It is like taking the cat in your lap after 
holding a squirrel. 

What a comfort a dull but kindly person is, to 
be sure, at times ! A ground-glass shade over a 
gas-lamp does not bring more solace to our daz- 
zled eyes than such a one to our minds. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Tablb. 



November 24. 

Men often remind me of pears in their way of 
coming to maturity. Some are ripe at twenty, like 
human Jargonelles, and must be made the most of, 
for their day is soon over. Some come into their 
perfect condition late, like the autumn kinds, and 
they last better than the summer fruit. And some 
that, like the Winter-Nelis, have been hard and un- 
inviting until all the rest have had their season, 
get their glow and perfume long after the frost 
and snow have done their worst with the orchards. 
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



November 25. 

And shall we breathe in happier spheres 
The names that pleased our mortal ears ; 
In some sweet lull of harp and song 
For earth-born spirits none too long, 
Just whispering of the world below 
Where this was Bill, and that was Joe? 

No matter ; while our home is here 
No sounding name is half so dear; 
When fades at length our lingering day, 
W^ho cares what pompous tombstones say ? 
Read on the hearts that love us still, 
Hicjacet Joe. Hie jacet Bill. 

Bill and Job. 
♦ 

November 26. 

Our honest Puritan festival is spreading, not, as 
formerly, as a kind of opposition Christmas, but 
as a welcome prelude and adjunct, a brief interval 
of good cheer and social rejoicing, heralding the 
longer season of feasting and rest from labor in 
the month that follows. 

Thanksgiving is the winding up of autumn. The 
leaves are off the trees, except here and there on 
a beech or an oak ; there is nothing left on the 
boughs but a few nuts and empty birds' nests. 
The earth looks desolate, and it will be a comfort 
to have the snow on the ground, and to hear the 
merry jingle of the sleigh-bells. The Seasons. 



November 27. 

As in some great artist's studio one may find un- 
finished sketches which he recognizes as the first 
growing conceptions of pictures painted in after 
years, so we see that Nature often sketches, as it 
were, a living portrait, which she leaves in its rudi- 
mentary condition, perhaps for the reason that earth 
has no colors which can worthily fill in an outline 
too perfect for humanity. The sketch is left in its 
consummate incompleteness because this mortal 
life is not rich enough to carry out the Divine idea. 

Such an unfinished but unmatched outline is 
that which I find in the long portrait-gallery of 
memory, recalled by the name of Charles Chauncy 
Emerson. Save for a few brief glimpses of an- 
other, almost lost among my life's early shadows, 
this youth was the most angelic adolescent my 
eyes ever beheld. Ralph Waldo Emerson. 



November 28. 
Thou calm, chaste scholar ! I can see thee now, 
The first young laurels on thy pallid brow, 
O'er thy slight figure floating lightly down 
In graceful folds the academic gown, 
On thy curled lip the classic lines that taught 
How nice the mind that sculptured them with 

thought, 
And triumph glistening in the clear blue eye, 
Too bright to live, — but O, too fair to die. 

POETRV. 



November 29. 

One memory predominates over all others, in 
walking through the halls, or still more in wan- 
dering through the grounds of Wilton House. 
Here Sir Philip Sidney wrote his " Arcadia," and 
the ever youthful presence of the man himself 
rather than the recollection of his writings takes 
possession of us. . . . Sidney, " that glorious star, 
that lively pattern of virtue and the lovely joy of 
all the learned sort, — born into the world to show 
unto our age a sample of ancient virtue." 

Here where he mused and wrote, and shaped his 
lofty plans for a glorious future, he lives once more 
in our imagination, as if his spirit haunted the 
English Arcadia he loved so dearlv. 

Our Hundred Days in Europe. 



November 30. 

Genius gets the world's praise, because its work 
is a tangible product, to be bought, or had for 
nothing. It bribes the common voice to praise it 
by presents of speeches, poems, statues, pictures, 
or whatever it can please with. Character evolves 
its best products for home consumption ; but, mind 
you, it takes a deal more to feed a family for thirty 
years than to make a holiday feast for our neigh- 
bors once or twice in our lives. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. 



SDcccmtier* 



NEARING THE SNOW-LINE. 

Slow toiling upward from the misty vale 

I leave the bright enamelled zones below ; 

No more for me their beauteous bloom shall 
glow, 
Their lingering sweetness load the morning gale ; 
Few are the slender flowerets, scentless, pale. 

That on their ice-clad stems all trembling blow 

Along the margin of unmelting snow ; 
Yet with unsaddened voice thy verge I hail. 

White realm of peace above the flowering line ; 
Welcome thy frozen domes, thy rocky spires ! 

O'er thee undimmed the moon-girt planets shine, 
On thy majestic altars fade the fires 
That filled the air with smoke of vain desires. 

And all the unclouded blue of heaven is thine ! 

j8io. 



December i. 

Time that brings 

An end to mortal things, 
That sends the beggar Winter in the train 

Of Autumn's burdened wain. 
Time, that is heir of all our earthly state, 

And knoweth well to wait 
Till sea hath turned to shore and shore to sea, 

If so it need must be, 
Ere he make good his claim and call his own 

Old empires overthrown,— 
Time, who can find no heavenly orb too large 

To hold its fee in charge. 
Nor any motes that fill its beams so small. 

But he shall care for all. Even-Song. 



December 2. 

The infancy and childhood of commencing old 
age have the same ingenuous simplicity and de- 
lightful unconsciousness about them as the first 
stage of the earlier periods of life shows. The 
great delusion of mankind is in supposing that to 
be individual and exceptional which is universal 
and according to law. A person is always startled 
when he hears himself seriously called an old 
man for the first time. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



December 3. 

We may count as symbols the three hills of 
"this darling town of ours," as Emerson called it, 
and say that each had its beacon. Civil liberty 
lighted the torch on one summit, religious freedom 
caught the flame and shone from the second, and 
the lamp of the scholar has burned steadily on the 
third from the days when John Cotton preached 
his first sermon to those in which we are living. 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 
• Each has his features, whose exterior seal 
A brush may copy, or a sunbeam steal ; 
Go to his study, — on the nearest shelf 
Stands the mosaic portrait of himself. 

The Study. 
• 

December 4. 

Carlyle did not show to as much advantage un- 
der the Boswellizing process as the dogmatist of 
the last century, dear old Dr. Johnson. But he 
remains not the less one of the really interesting 
men of his generation, — a man about whom we 
wish to know all that we have a right to know. 

The long-suffering, much-laboring, loud-com- 
plaining Heraclitus of his time, whose very smile 
had a grimness in it more ominous than his scowl. 
. . . Poor man! — for all his complaining must 
have meant real discomfort, which a man of genius 
feels not less certainly than a common mortal. 

Our Hundred Days in Europe. 



December 5. 

The truant goose-quill travelling like Planchette; 
Too ready servant, whose deceitful ways 
Full many a slipshod line, alas ! betrays ; 
Hence of the rhyming thousand not a few 
Have builded worse — a great deal — than they 
knew. The School-Boy. 

Who writes in verse that should have writ in 

prose 
Is like a traveller walking on his toes ; 
Happy the rhymester who in time has found 
The heels he lifts were made to touch the ground. 
Poem for the Harvard Anniversary. 



December 6. 

There are words so delicious their sweetness will 
smother 
That boarding-school flavor of which we 're 
afraid, — 
There is " lush " is a good one, and "swirl " is an- 
other, — 
Put both in one stanza, its fortune is made. 

Perhaps you will answer all needful conditions 
For winning the laurels to which you aspire, 

By docking the tails of the two prepositions 
I' the style o' the bards you so greatly admire. 
A Familiar Letter. 



December 7. 

O Damsel Dorothy ! Dorothy Q. ! 

Strange is the gift that I owe to you ; 

Such a gift as never a king 

Save to daughter or son might bring, — 

All my tenure of heart and hand, 

All my title to house and land ; 

Mother and sister and child and wife 

And joy and sorrow and death and life ! . . • 

Soft is the breath of a maiden's Yes : 

Not the light gossamer stirs with less; 

But never a cable that holds so fast 

Through all the battles of wave and blast, 

And never an echo of speech or song 

That lives in the babbling air so long ! 

There were tones in the voice that whispered then 

You may hear to-day in a hundred men. 

Dorothy Q. 
» 

December 8. 

A coin, a ring, a string of verses. These last, 
and hardly anything else does. Every century is 
an overloaded ship that must sink at last with most 
of its cargo. The small portion of its crew that 
get on board the new vessel which takes them off 
don't pretend to save a great many of the bulky 
articles. But they must not and will not leave be- 
hind the hereditary jewels of the race. 

The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 



December 9. 

Besides all the impressions that furnished the 
stuff of the poem, there has been hard work to 
get the management of that wonderful instrument 
— the great organ, language. An artist that works 
in marble or colors has them all to himself and his 
tribe, but the man who moulds his thought in 
verse has to employ the materials vulgarized by 
everybody's use, and glorify them by his handling. 
. . . Read your Milton and see what training, what 
patient labor, it took before he could shape our 
common speech into his majestic harmonies. 

The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 



December 10. 
There is infinite pathos in unsuccessful author- 
ship. The book that perishes unread is the deaf 
mute of literature. The great asylum of Oblivion 
is full of such, making inaudible signs to each 
other in leaky garrets and unattainable dusty up- 
per shelves. The Guardian Angel. 

The young American of any freshness of intel- 
lect is stimulated to dangerous excess by the con- 
ditions of life into which he is born. There is a 
double proportion of oxygen in the New World 
air. The chemists have not found it out yet, but 
human brains and breathing organs have long 
since made the discovery. The Guardian Angel. 



December ii. 

Literary life is full of curious phenomena. 1 
don't know that there is anything more noticeable 
than what we may call c^uventio7ial reputations. 
There is a tacit understanding in every community 
of men of letters that they will not disturb the 
popular fallacy respecting this or that electro-gilded 
celebrity. 

The venerable augurs of the literary or scien- 
tific temple may smile faintly when one of the 
tribe is mentioned ; but the farce is in general kept 
up as well as the Chinese comic scene of entreat- 
ing and imploring a man to stay with you, with the 
implied compact between you that he shall by no 
means think of doing it. A poor wretch he must 
be who would wantonly sit down on one of these 
bandbox reputations. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Tabi.e. 
— « 

December 12. 

And Channingvi\th his bland superior look, 
Cool as a moonbeam on a frozen brook, 
While the pale student, shivering in his shoes. 
Sees from his theme the turgid rhetoric ooze. 
Vestigia Quinque Retrorsum. 
With eye undimmed, with strength unworn, 

Still toiling in your Master's field. 

Before you wave the growths unshorn, 

Their ripened harvest yet to yield. 

tS8s. To Frederick Henry Hedge. 



December 13. 

Nature lends her mirror of illusion 

To win trom saddening scenes our age-dimmed 
eyes, 
And misty day-dreams blend in sweet confusion 

The wintry landscape and the summer skies. 

So when the iron portal shuts behind us. 

And life forgets us in its noise and whirl. 
Visions that shunned the glaring noonday find us, 
And glimmering starlight shows the gates of 
pearl. The Iron Gate. 
♦ 

December 14. 

If a man has a genuine, sincere, hearty wish to 
get rid of his liberty, if he is really bent upon be- 
coming a slave, nothing can stop him. And the 
temptation is to some natures a very great one. 
Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It in- 
volves that necessity for perpetual choice which is 
the kind of labor men have always dreaded. 

Elsie Venner. 

It is such a sad thing to be born a sneaking 
fellow, that I sometimes feel as if we ought to love 
the crippled souls with a certain tenderness which 
we need not waste on noble natures. One who is 
born with such congenital incapacity that nothing 
can make a gentleman of him is entitled, not to 
our wrath, but to our profoundest sympathy. 

The Autocr.\t of the Breakfast-Table. 



December 15. 

Every scholar should have a book infirmary at- 
tached to his library. There should find a peace- 
able refuge the many books, invalids from their 
birth, which are sent " with the best regards of the 
Author"; the respected, but unpresentable crip- 
ples which have lost a cover ; the odd volumes of 
honored sets which go mourning all their days for 
their lost brother ; the school-books which have 
been so often the subjects of assault and battery, 
that they look as if the police court must know 
them by heart ; these and still more the pictured 
story-books, beginning with Mother Goose, will be 
precious mementos by and by, when children and 
grandchildren come along. 

The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 



December 16. 

Up to the age of thirty we spend our years like 

change ; 
But creeping up towards the forties, as fast as the 

old years fill, 
And time steps in for payment, we seem to change 
a bill. At a Meeting of Friends. 

Little of all we value here 
Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year 
Without both feeling and looking queer. 
In fact, there 's nothing that keeps its youth, 
So far as I know, but a tree and truth. 

The Deacon's Masterpiece. 



December 17. 

Friend, whom thy fourscore winters leave more 

dear 
Than when life's roseate summer on thy cheek 
Burned in the flush of manhood's manliest year, 
Lonely, how lonely ! is the snowy peak 
Thy feet have reached, and mine have climbed so 

near ! 
Close on my footsteps 'mid the landscape drear 
I stretch my hand thine answering grasp to seek, 
Warm with the love no rippling rhymes can 

speak ! 
Look backwards ! From thy lofty height survey 
Thy years of toil, of peaceful victories won, 
Of dreams made real, largest hopes outrun ! 
Look forward ! Brighter than earth's morning ray 
Streams the pure light of Heaven's unsetting sun, 
The unclouded dawn of life's immortal day ! 
iSS"^. To John Greenleaf Whittier. 
♦— — 

December 18. 

If your name is to live at all, it is so much more 
to have it live in people's hearts than only in their 
brains ! I don't know that one's eyes fill with 
tears when he thinks of the famous inventor of 
logarithms, but a song of Burns's or a hymn of 
Charles Wesley's goes straight to your heart, and 
you can't help loving both of them, the sinner as 
well as the saint. 

The Poet at the Breakfast-Tablb. 



December 19. 

A whiter soul, a fairer mind, 

A life with purer course and aim, 
A gentler eye, a voice more kind, 
We may not look on earth to find. 
The love that lingers o'er his name 
Is more than fame. 
In Memory of John and Robert Warb. 



December 20. 

The snow has capped yon distant hill, 
At morn the running brook was still, 
From driven herds the clouds that rise 
Are like the smoke of sacrifice ; 
Erelong the frozen sod shall mock 
The ploughshare, changed to stubborn rock. 
The brawling streams shall soon be dumb — 
Sing, little bird ! the frosts have come. 

An Old-Year Song. 

With all its inconveniences, winter is a cheerful 
season to people who are in comfortable circum- 
stances and have open fire-places. A house with- 
out these is like a face without eyes, and that 
never smiles. I have seen respectability and amia- 
bility grouped over the airtight stove ; I have seen 
virtue and intelligence hovering over the register ; 
but I have never seen true happiness in a family 
circle where the faces were not illuminated by the 
blaze of an open fire-place. The Seasons. 



December 21. 

Here comes Winter, savage as when he met 
the Pilgrhns at Plymouth, Indian all over, his staff 
a naked splintery hemlock, his robe torn from the 
backs of bears and bisons, and fringed with wam- 
pum of rattling icicles, turning the ground he 
treads to ringing iron, and, like a mighty sower, 
casting his snow far and wide, over all hills and 
valleys and plains. The Seasons. 

Here 's to all the good people, wherever they be, 
Who have grown in the shade of the liberty-tree ; 
We all love its leaves, and its blossoms and fruit, 
But pray have a care of the fence round its root. 
New England Society Celebration. 



December 22. 

I saw in the naked forest 

Our scattered remnant cast, 
A screen of shivering branches 

Between them and the blast ; 
The snow was faL.ng round them, 

The dying fell as fast, 
I looked to see them perish. 

When lo, the vision passed. 

Again mine eyes were opened ; 

The feeble had waxed strong. 
The babes had grown to sturdy men. 

The remnant was a throng. 

The Pilgrim's Vision. 



December 23. 

Living, thou dost not live, 
If mercy's spring run dry ; 
What Heaven has lent thee wilt thou freely give, 
Dying, thou shalt not die ! The Promise. 
• 

December 24. 

O thou whose breathing form was once so dear, 
"Whose cheering voice was music to my ear, 
Art thou not with me as my feet pursue 
The village paths so well thy boyhood knew, . . . 
Or the old homestead's narrowed bounds explore, 
Where sloped the roof that sheds the rains no 

more, 
Where one last relic still remains to tell 
Here stood thy home, — the memory-haunted well, 
Whose waters quench a deeper thirst than thine, 
Changed at my lips to sacramental wine. . . . 

Still in my heart thy loved remembrance burns ; 
Still to my lips thy cherished name returns ; 
Could I but feel thy gracious presence near 
Amid the groves that once to thee were dear ! 
Could but my trembling lips with mortal speech 
Thy listening ear for one brief moment reach ! 
How vain the dream ! The pallid voyager's track 
No sign betrays ; he sends no message back. . . . 
Now from the margin of the silent sea, 
Take my last offering ere I cross to thee ! 

A Family Record. 



December 25. 

They found the crowded inn, the oxen's shed. 

No pomp was there, no glory shone around 

On the coarse straw that strewed the reeking 

ground ; 
One dim retreat a flickering torch betrayed, — 
In that poor cell the Lord of Life was laid ! 

The wondering shepherds told their breathless 
tale 
Of the bright choir that woke the sleeping vale ; 
Told how the skies with sudden glory flamed, 
Told how the shining multitude proclaimed, 
" Joy» joy to earth ! Behold the hallowed morn ! 
In David's city Christ the Lord is born ! " . . . 

They spoke with hurried words and accents wild ; 
Calm in his cradle slept the heavenly child. 
No trembling word the mother's joy revealed, — 
One sigh of rapture, and her lips were sealed ; 
Unmoved she saw the rustic train depart, 
But kept their words to ponder in her heart. 

A Mother's Secrbt. 



December 26. 

The lonely spirit of the mournful lay. 
Which lives immortal as the verse of Gray, 
In sable plumage slowly drifts along, 
On eagle pinion, through the air of song. 

Poetry. 



December 27. 

I think there is one habit worse than that of 
punning. It is the gradual substitution of cant 
or flash terms for words which truly characterize 
their objects. I have known several very genteel 
idiots whose whole vocabulary had deliquesced 
into some half-dozen expressions. 

These expressions come to be the algebraic sym- 
bols of minds which have grown too weak or indo- 
lent to discriminate. They are the blank checks 
of intellectual bankruptcy ; — you may fill them up 
with what idea you like ; it makes no difference, 
for there are no funds in the treasury upon which 
they are drawn. 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 



December 28. 

Beliefs must be lived in for a good while, before 
they accommodate themselves to the soul's wants, 
and wear loose enough to be comfortable. 

Elsie Venner. 

I love the memory of the past, — its pressed yet 

fragrant flowers, — 
The moss that clothes its broken walls, — the ivy 

on its towers ; — 
Nay, this poor bauble it bequeathed, — my eyes 

grow moist and dim, 
To think of all the vanished joys that danced 

around its brim. On Lending a Punch-Bowl. 



December 29. 

Do you want to be remembered after the con- 
tinents have gone under, and come up again, and 
dried, and bred new races ? Have your name 
stamped on all your plates and cups and saucers. 
Nothing of you and yours will last like those. 

The Guardian Angel. 

To shape a Senate's choice, 
By the strong magic of the master's voice ; 
To ride the stormy tempest of debate 
That whirls the wavering fortunes of the state. 
The Banker's Dinner. 



December 30. 

The seasons moved on in their rhythmical flow 
With mornings like maidens that pouted or 

smiled, 
With the bud and the leaf and the fruit and the 

snow. 
And the year-books of Time in his alcoves were 

piled. The Shadows. 

Good-night, fond dreamer ! let the curtain fall : 
The world's a stage and we are players all. 
A strange rehearsal ! Kings without their crowns 
And threadbare lords and jewel -wearing clowns 
Speak the vain words that mock their throbbing 

hearts 
As Want, stem prompter ! spells them out their 

parts. The Old Player. 



December 31. 

Oh, let us trust with holy men of old 
Not all the story here begun is told ; 
So the tired spirit, waiting to be freed. 
On life's last leaf with tranquil eye shall read, 
By the pale glimmer of the torch reversed', 
Not Finis, but The End of Volume Fii-st ! 
Vestigia Quinque Retrorsum. 

And so, my fellow-spectator at the great show 
of the Four Seasons, I wish you a pleasant seat 
through the performances, and that you may see as 
many repetitions of the same as it is good for you 
to witness, which I doubt not will be arranged for 
you by the Manager of the Exhibition. After a 
time you will notice that the light fatigues the eyes, 
so that by degrees they grow dim, and the ear be- 
comes a little dull to the music, and possibly you 
may find yourself somewhat weary, — for many of 
the seats are very far from being well cushioned. 
. . . There are no checks given you as you pass 
out, by which you can return to the place j'^ou have 
left. But we are told that there is another exhibi- 
tion to follow, in which the scenery will be far 
lovelier, and the music infinitely sweeter. Dear 
reader, I thank thee for thy courtesy, and let me 
venture to hope that we shall both be admitted to 
that better entertainment, and that thou and I may 
be seated not far from each other. Thb Seasons. 



'^'}Kifi^''^^]'M^i£ 







